Warhammer Fantasy RPG 3rd Ed- A Game of Grim and Perilous Adeventure

No-Quarter

OK, so this looks frippin boss:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=93&esem=1



From Fantasy Flight games:

A new age is beginning. The winds of magic blow strongly, and the Old World’s two moons shine brightly in the night sky. Storms appear out of nowhere, and the land is rife with conflict. From the north descend savage groups of chaos marauders, men dedicated to the four Ruinous Powers of Chaos. They are seen side by side with degenerate beastmen and profane daemons. Their raids are striking further and further south, yet they are only the scouting forces.

Within, the lands of the Empire are besieged by Orcs and members of hidden cults. The Orcs delight in battle, and are laying waste to all they can find. The enemy within is rising up and striking vicious blows that mankind is unprepared to face. War is coming on all sides.

For every age, there are heroes willing to stand up and fight, or common folk for whom destiny has its own unseen plans. This age sees the arrival of many new warriors. Dwarfs, humans, high elves, and the enigmatic wood elves must set aside their differences to face the forces bent on destroying the Old World. Fortune favors the brave, and these heroes will need all the fortune they can muster.

Big-ass boxset comes with all this:

* 4 comprehensive rule books provide all the knowledge you will need on the Old World
* Over 30 Custom Dice give you unprecedented options for story-telling
* Party sheets provide new skills and abilities to keep everyone engaged
* 30 different careers and 4 different races offer a multitude of character options
* More than 300 cards keep you in the game, no need to look up skills or abilities
* Three character keepers designed to hold everything your hero will need each session

And here's a 10 minute video inside look: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=93&esem=4

Here's a review from over on Bell of Lost Souls: http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2009/11/review-ffg-warhammer-fantasy-roleplay.html

My friends wanna play pen and paper and we're big WH fans. I'm thinking of asking for this for Christmas, does anyone have any experience with the other editions? FFG also did Dark heresy and that's a pretty quality game. I'm a little hesitant because I already own some books for a very popular RPG which may or may not be in it's 4th incarnation, and I want to know if 100 bucks (well, less on Amazon) is worth it. Otherwise call me sold.

Morskittar

I've been meaning to do an OP for this for a week now, but I've been too busy playing this (and, uh... working) to do so. Thanks!

This game is the shit. It's revitalized my interest in RPGs more than anything in the past decade. Or two. Here's my quick review I wrote after the demo weekend for the mouth-breathers over at Warseer:

My initial impressions of the rules were spot on; I really dig this game.

I’ve played two full games and had a complete character building session. For the non-demo game, it took me and five players less than five hours to roll up characters, teach/learn the rules, and complete a three-encounter session. This was meant to be an impromptu, one-off learn-the-rules session, but the players took to the rules, setting, and their characters so well that they’ve demanded we continue as an actual campaign. A few observations from the sessions I’ve run now:

+ Sharing a deck of cards between players (as opposed to passing around a book) facilitates parties of any size. You can write everything down on the character sheet well enough, and aren’t tied to holding the cards or having enough to go around. We just kept the shared cards in a convenient spot and players referenced them like they would a rulebook (albeit one that contained only exactly what they needed).

+ I love the dice mechanic. It’s fundamentally no different than adding up stats and modifiers, then rolling for a target number, only more visual and flexible. The game literally has *one* random mechanic. That’s it. Players can learn this game and begin playing in fifteen minutes or so. Conversely, how you build the dice pool provides enough flexibility to represent negotiations, searches through the jungle, combat, chases, and anything else I threw at it.

+ Social encounters with heavy mechanics are fun and seemed to encourage roleplaying. While I’m sure this will have little benefit for some gaming styles, we found that roleplaying in *reaction* to the little mechanical bits, randomness, and hints created for a great sense of excitement, as outcomes were unknown. It gave rules-mediated social encounters the same sense of urgency as combat, which in turn made for a tense and exciting game that involved about two total turns of combat, at most.

+ The physicality of building dice pools, stance trackers, and the like made for a much more collaborative game than most RPGs. All the players were right there, pitching in with grabbing dice, staying engaged, and helping interpret the results. It was a subtle difference, but noticeable. The game rules weren’t in a book for one person to see at a time, but out in front of us for everyone to get involved with.

+ I didn’t like the demo adventure. The lack of included monster statlines and very odd pacing made it difficult to run smoothly. It also didn’t make sense in a lot of places; one of the PCs was supposed to receive a package, but an entire encounter was based around trying to convince the deliverer to give the package to the PCs (or admit that it existed).

+ I found there were still some things I tracked with a pencil and paper, rather than the counters and bits. With a combat encounter of 7 NPCs, it became cumbersome to use counters or wound cards to track damage. I just jotted down notes, and drew wound cards as necessary. This system was easy enough for PCs to manage though.

+ Fatigue and Stress (the former gained on certain results for physical actions, the latter mental) were cool, but fiddly to track. For example: character with four stress counters needs to check how this compares to each mental attribute (Intelligence, Willpower, Fellowship) whenever they use an ability related to that attribute. Any attribute that has less than counters gets a misfortune die when used to generate a dice pool – in practice; this was forgotten quite a bit and somewhat difficult to track. Still, that may be a new game thing, and they’re pretty essential to balancing the PCs and making them consider their actions.

There’s a lot more, so I’ll continue as I find more time.

In short, it's an RPG that truly gets the fuck out of the way of storytelling. The social encounter system is more robust than anything I've seen, and anyone who suggests that it's a boardgame and *not* an RPG (other than using BG components instead of jotting things down on paper) is a dumb shit.

Kevin R Brown

*Cough*

...Maybe it's just me, but I hate promo videos that repeatedly state how 'innovative' and 'revolutionary' a game is. No, mister bald guy, your game is not the first game to use action cards, nor will it likely be the last.


It's looks like a nifty game, but I'm not all that into the Warhammer fiction, so I'm not sure it'd do much for me that isn't already done by *insert fantasy dungeon crawler RPG here*.

Havelock

:shock:

Dammit I've already invested moneys into Dark Heresy, what more does FFG want of me?

Blood?








<_<

for the blood god

No-Quarter

Mannnnnnnnnnnnnn if you're not going to talk bigshit about your own game no one sure as hell else will.

@ Morskittar, I just read through the Demo adventure, it's alright, but I didn't seem very confusing to me, and it list the page numbers for the Beastmen and Wargors in the Tome of Adventure.

...

ADVENTURE! I am soooo psyched

EDIT:

Morskittar

No-Quarter wrote: »

Mannnnnnnnnnnnnn if you're not going to talk bigshit about your own game no one sure as hell else will.

@ Morskittar, I just read through the Demo adventure, it's alright, but I didn't seem very confusing to me, and it list the page numbers for the Beastmen and Wargors in the Tome of Adventure.

...

ADVENTURE! I am soooo psyched

The structure didn't flow in practice. The characters went out of their way to get rid of the Gor's horn, which didn't appreciably slow down the escalation. The "climax" then is sitting and talking to the guy to give up the package... the package that he was instructed to give to one of the characters in particular before the attack. I was also flipping between books because of the monster thing; not horrible, but *notably* less convenient than the rest of the game (and full starting scenario in the Tome of Adventure).

Not something I'd run again without a number of tweaks.

That aside, I am loving this game so far. I ran a swashbuckling/exploration deal based on an RE Howard story (The Pool of the Black One) and have played a Barber-Surgeon who's faith in Science (and leeches) was shaken by a raving cultist in another.

Kevin R Brown wrote: »

*insert fantasy dungeon crawler RPG here*.

WFRP is by no means a dungeon crawler. It usually ends up as a Renaissance-pulp-fantasy investigative-horror-crime, looming apocalypse deal. Deckhands, poets, and ratcatchers wouldn't end up in a dungeon (unless dragged there in a drunken stupor by an overzealous suicidal dwarf).

TheLawinator

But... do I really have to spend 100 bucks for it? That hurts.

Morskittar

Well, 60-something if you wait for Amazon to ship. But yeah, it's expensive. It's like buying the contents of an average FFG boardgame bundled with four regular RPG splatbooks. Content and price-wise.

TheLawinator

Morskittar wrote: »

Well, 60-something if you wait for Amazon to ship. But yeah, it's expensive. It's like buying the contents of an average FFG boardgame bundled with four regular RPG splatbooks. Content and price-wise.

Yea, kind of used to FFG pricing now that I bought a bunch of games from them.

Kevin R Brown

WFRP is by no means a dungeon crawler. It usually ends up as a Renaissance-pulp-fantasy investigative-horror-crime, looming apocalypse deal. Deckhands, poets, and ratcatchers wouldn't end up in a dungeon (unless dragged there in a drunken stupor by an overzealous suicidal dwarf).

Oh, that's interesting. What are the mechanics?

I'm pretty harsh when it comes to PR videos in general, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but this one really didn't tell me anything other than, "WOW. THIS GAME IS SO AWESOME. IT IS SO UNIQUE. PLZ BUY IT SO WE CAN RECOVER OUR LOSSES FROM ANDROID BOMBING SO BAD."

The review wasn't much better.

The components look neat (like in any FF production), but I need to be told what it is they do that makes the game stand out before I can really gain an appreciation for them. :P

Mannnnnnnnnnnnnn if you're not going to talk bigshit about your own game no one sure as hell else will.

Well, yes - I understand the reason that companies release this type of PR. I just personally find them unbearably pretentious.

That being said, plenty of people have talked about games like Agricola, Chaos in the Old World and Space Hulk (to name a few really successful recent titles) without the need for the publishing house to drone on about how 'innovative' their new product is. I can usually decide that for myself.

Morskittar

The word "innovative" needs to be banned.

The game has (at least, in my mind) two key mechanical standouts:

The dice system effectively takes your character's stats, skills, momentum, modifiers, and target number and boils it down into a dice pool. The goofy multicolored dice take about 10 minutes to master (building pools and reading the results) and give extremely varied results, as well as supporting on-the-fly GM calls. That's the core of the game right there, the same for melee and social. It's all about how the fiddly bits and situations interact with the pool. The results also suggest success or failure by luck, skill, or other factors, giving pretty immediate narrative cues for the GM and players.

The second part is all the cards, chits, and fiddly components. They put the "in-game" (ie: outside of character creation and the basic mechanics) rules right in front of players, which frees the GM up to present the story. Some GMs may not want that, but for a part-timer like me, anything that unloads rulekeeping on the players is a good thing.

Kevin R Brown

The second part is all the cards, chits, and fiddly components. They put the "in-game" (ie: outside of character creation and the basic mechanics) rules right in front of players, which frees the GM up to present the story. Some GMs may not want that, but for a part-timer like me, anything that unloads rulekeeping on the players is a good thing.

Okay - this is the part where I'm getting hung up. Just to use 4th Edition as an example: say I use Character Builder (...Or, well, almost any piece of graphic design software) to print out ability cards for my character.

...Haven't I just achieved exactly the same thing with my D&D game as has been done in WHRPG 3rd Edition?

Or is there more to it than that?

Morskittar

No, that's pretty much it. You're getting all the cards (plus counters instead of beads/pencils/raisins/whatever) as the baseline, rather than the add-on to the existing rulebook. They're designed that way from the ground-up, so there's no reference back to the rules, but that's not so different from D&D 4e (which, I gather, was designed with the same "offload on the players" intent).

If the setting, mechanics, and ability to pay 60-100 bucks for the core game and not have to print anything don't do it for you, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.

Kevin R Brown

The second part is all the cards, chits, and fiddly components. They put the "in-game" (ie: outside of character creation and the basic mechanics) rules right in front of players, which frees the GM up to present the story. Some GMs may not want that, but for a part-timer like me, anything that unloads rulekeeping on the players is a good thing.

Cool beans; that's more or less all I wanted to know.

Xagarath

My chief problem with this whole idea is having rules on the cards that aren't replicated in the rulebooks.
Lose one, you've got problems; and it prevents people trying to, say, run with the dice pool system but without the cards.

SageinaRage

I'm kind of a combination of curious and dubious about this. I loved WFRP 2nd edition, which I think was a fantastic system, so I admit I'm a little biased. But, the dice pooling thing sounds interesting, and kind of an extension of how I generally run my games anyway.

The big thing for me is just the cost. Making all of the cards and things required is kind of silly to me. You don't really need cards if you need a character sheet. Lots of sheets are streamlined to just write numbers down if you know the rules, but there's nothing preventing you from writing down your mechanics and rolls and things. But yeah, when coming from games where the base cost is 30-50 bucks for a book, spending 100 for a 'kit' makes me kind of .

Morskittar

I'm not worried about losing cards; in a given session you don't seem to have a lot floating around and FFG is pretty solid about replacing lost bits. That said, it would be nice to have a "GM's reference" book. Building encounters and studying rules is cumbersome with the cards. The fact that the whole system could be printed in book format and work perfectly well (as well as working better for those who prefer the form factor) indicates to me that they intended for that to be a possibility, maybe depending on sales.

As for the price point? After It's cheaper than 3 D&D books or a few full units of Clanrats. I'll get more use with my group than either of those. Very much YMMV though. It'll be the first time in about five or six years where I have players interested and willing to try a WFRP game on a regular basis.

Morskittar

The first adventure/campaign has been announced. Looks promising, though I'm curious to see the actual price and contents.

No-Quarter

Gotta say this looks at least as quality a product as the other stuff FFG has put out. Mmmm.

Utsanomiko

I can't believe I missed this thread. Last time I brought it up in an RPG thread here it did not get very good response.

For 60-100 bucks the set is reasonable, considering how much money and time/effort it takes to prepare and furnish your roleplaying group for a new game. D&D's starter sets aren't that far off for the essential 3 books and a set of dice, and that still doesn't have all the useful tools for running the game with 3-6 other people.

Eveyone's gotta have their own dice, everyone needs character sheets printed out and filled from scratch, there's tokens or minis to use, and you'll want to provide handouts and supplements and additional items, everyone needs their own book to find specific rules and equipment and actions and whatnot unless they're all going to fumble with sharing yours every night...

I'm not too snobbish with my RPGs to admit I benefit from visual aids, and some people require them. So I cringe every time I think about introducing RPGs to new people and realize how much stuff they need is hidden away in one impenetrable tome. A lot of those items are things I wish I had time to make for D&D and Dark Heresy (and skill to do it well). But I suppose money works too.

I'll admit that I still want to see what can be bought separate from the box (which ultimately is meant to be a complete starter set for new groups to actually learn to play on their own in case the skeevies at the game club are too busy to teach noobs). I see they'll have dice, but additional counters and separate books could be useful for some people.

What exactly are the cards that have rules that aren't in any of the rulebooks? I was under the impression the main WH Roleplay book in the game still covered the professions and actions, as the cards' purpose was being able to separate and sort out the rules you needed.