DagobahDave
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Posts posted by DagobahDave
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GREYLORD: Okay, basics.
You get into combat, you first see who has the higher initiative. Don't know if it will be the dice or not, but I figure it could be, in which case the GM asks you to roll your dice stat. Let's say it's 2, so you roll 2 dice. The enemy has 3 dice they roll. YOU manage to roll 2 success, the enemy one, so you get to go first.
What do you think the other dice are going to be used for? And what about the other symbols other than the hammers? There are eagles and hourglasses and stuff. Have you thought about how those might be used? I'd find it strange if the other symbols mean nothing. In fact I'm pretty sure that each one puts a twist on the roll you've made. I'm not sure what those twists might be, or how they'll affect play, though.
I wonder if hammers are hits and eagles are blocks, or something like that, rather than hammers always being a success all time.
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This is a serious question, and I promise that I'm not setting you up for anything. I honestly want to know how you imagine the experience of playing this new game will be like. Walk us through it. Don't just say it's going to be like a board game, or like D&D4E, because that's not what I'm asking.
Start as though you were describing a night of gaming with your friends. You're gathered around, ready to play the new version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The GM opens up the box, unpacks all of the cards and books and dice, and then what? What do you think the next step will be?
What does the GM do? Is he just a card-dealer? As a player, do you wait your turn silently, then flip your cards, roll some dice and knock on the table to let other players know your turn is over? Is it a waste of time to speak in a funny accent while playing this game, since roleplaying isn't part of it?
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MILLANDSON said:
Hello Mr Kettle, I'm Mrs. Pot. You, sir, are black.
I think Captin' was having a "I've just been accused of being a troll so I'm going to go find a post that's pro-something and call them a troll. Graarr!"
We could probably report him and just be done with it, but I think Captin' will wander off or start liking the game before long.
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I imagine party stress would be pretty high about now.
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There's a theory that customers who are disappointed at first, but receive good service to make up for it, are more satisfied than customers who have a smooth transaction each time. Also, you will tell more people about a bad transaction than a good one.
I don't think FFG wanted a negative reaction, but it might work in their favor. Red tendrils of negative publicity are spreading to board gamers and card gamers, some of whom would never have noticed or cared about an RPG who now might take a peek in. By the time those groups arrive, I think the popular opinion will have softened quite a bit.
I think even if they had prepared a really thorough preview of the game, rather than describing the various elements in vague terms, there would have been just as much shock and disappointment. A lot of us feel like WFRP is in our blood... and then we saw pictures of this weird alien thing.
If you read the promo material again with an open mind, it seems to be doing what it's supposed to -- which is to introduce a new RPG. We're only seeing some of the components, so it's impossible to get a sense of the system as a whole. That's the nature of a product announcement. You can't spill all the beans at once.
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This is my first look at it. Good stuff, as usual. Even if their games sometimes don't work out for me, the artistry that goes into everything Warhammer is what keeps me spending money on it.
It looks exactly like a scene from WAR. I hope we can still play low-level PCs that aren't expected to do that right away, but I definitely want to be able to get there.
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Captin' said:
Denying what?
Now we've got you thinkin'.
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Dreary_Angel said:
ok, please, tell me this was just sarcastic.
It's denial, is what it is. I wish I were kidding.
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There's so much encouraging news in there, I don't know where to start. I guess the thing I like the most is this:
The reason the careers are on cards is so that as more careers are added you just slip them in the career deck and have them all in one place rather than scattered over multiple books and supplements. Ditto for ability cards and spell cards.
That's about the best argument for using portable cards that can be made. You won't ever need a Career Compendium, Spell Compendium, Combat Compendium. I think it shows a real understanding of the fans' interests and how they use their game materials.
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A poster named Erifnogard posted this at RPGnet. I'm passing this along because it sounds awesome!
ERIFNOGARD: Ok, some highlights from the seminar at Gen Conn. Not too detailed as I'm posting from my phone.
One: there is nothing stopping you from running any size group you want from the core box. The Adventure Pack adds some additional career cards and some spare dice but the core comes with around 30 career cards as it is. Sure you might not have the nifty storage box for more than 3 characters, but just use an envelope or note what cards you need to pull next time. Additionally you could just transfer the info from the cards to your character sheet.
Two: they are doing some really cool stuff with the cards, they're not just there for the heck of it. The cards actually get rid of the need for a lot of the charts. For example when you take a wound you pull a wound card and place it face down in front of you. If at some point you are critted, just flip your top wound card over and there is the crit. Insanity is also handled like this with an Insanity deck.
Three: The party has a character sheet! Their is a fortune pool for the party and a party tension tracker that has some fatigue effects as party tension ratchets up in play. This stress is added based purely on the GMs observation of the party's roleplaying. Also characters can tag some of their abilities to the party for the benefit of all.
Four: every character has a "Stance" track with a conservative side and a reckless side to it that affects all their abilities and spells that they use based on which side of the track they are currently choosing to be on (and yes you can change which stance you are in often - usually every round). Different careers have different amounts of conservative vs reckless on their track and how far out on on one side or the other you currently are will have a greater affect on how things work out. It should be noted that all abilities and all spells have both a conservative and an aggressive version which have their own bnefits and drawbacks and they are handily summarized on opposite sides of their cards.
Five: The dice are integral to the whole system. You have dice for your ability. You swap some of those out for dice that represent your aggressive or conservative stance. Instead of modifiers for circumstances or tactics you add fortune or misfortune dice. There are a few other types that account for some other factors. Making the dice pools is going to be incredibly easy as you form your initial pool by reading right off the character sheet and the fortune/misfortune dice are given out by the gm as he describes the circumstances and you describe what you are doing and any tactics.
Six: This is not either a board game or a miniature game and does not require either a map or miniatures any more than current WFRP does.
Seven: The reason the careers are on cards is so that as more careers are added you just slip them in the career deck and have them all in one place rather than scattered over multiple books and supplements. Ditto for ability cards and spell cards.
Eight: Character generation - first you choose your race, then you draw three career cards and choose one. Or if you want to play hardcore you draw only one career and suck it up. Or (if you are a hippy, tree hugging elf - my words not theirs) you could just choose a career. Careers function very much like now with advances and skills. If you choose to leave your career without 'completing' it (i.e. take a certain number of your advances and skills) then you don't keep your career's special bonus. If you do complete your career you keep the special from your career. For the ratcatcher this would be the small but vicious dog (who apparently has his own abilities and is essentially your little, and vicious, minion). Note that you can still choose to buy skills not in your current career for a premium with gm approval.
I'll add more if I can remember it.
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I wouldn't expect WFRP3 to challenge D&D in the marketplace, but I do think that if the V3 design is successful it's going to challenge D&D and other games to create a similar experience.
I agree that 40KRP would've been a better challenge! I'm hoping that Deathwatch benefits from whatever we learn about playing V3, one way or another. It'll be interesting to see if FFG even considers breaking away from the pattern established by DH or RT.
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DeathFromAbove said:
thanks for your exceptionally hackneyed answers.I'll remember that the next time you ask a question, sweetheart.
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Hey, welcome aboard! Let's see if we can tackle some of your concerns.
DEATH FROM ABOVE: Why a "rushed" third edition? 5 years for an RPG (venerable as WH) is a very short time...
If I had to guess, it's because the game was handed off to Fantasy Flight Games at a time when WFRP2 felt like it was nearing the tail end of its cycle. I think V2 had a couple more years left in it, but I can see why FFG wouldn't want to wait that long to try to revitalize the brand.
2) Why a "package", with custom dice, "career cards", limited players, few careers (fourty?), etc.?
Why a package? To fit all the stuff in, of course!
Why the custom dice? They look interesting, they're unusual, they're (almost) proprietary, and custom symbols allow for dice with unusual distributions (for instance a D8 with 3 red sides and 5 green sides). I think the main reason is because they're going to be fun to roll. If I'm playing a Warhammer game and I'm rolling dice that have hammers on them instead of numbers, something is going right. You'll find out more about how the dice work if you stick around. It's kinda cool.
Why career cards? Convenience for the player in that career, probably. I think there's more to it, but I couldn't explain it without your knowing a little bit more about the game.
Limited players? There's an Adventurer's Toolkit that's supposed to include materials so that more players can join, but details are extra-sketchy on this one. I think the reason for the 4-player limit could be (ironically) the size of the box, and I think it must have been an agonizing decision to keep the core game limited to 4 players. Well, maybe not so agonizing. It's also a good way to sell extra stuff.
40 careers? That sounds like a good number to me, but we don't know the full list of careers yet, so we'll see. Maybe you stay in a single career for longer. Maybe there's a three-tier career system instead of the four-tier system. Maybe there are no foreign careers. Those could be some reasons why there are fewer careers. Just as with V2, some careers will only be available in later supplements.
3) Why obscure rules like "Flee or Die", "Narrative Tools" and the like. WarHammer is what it is thanks to the specifc rules system AND background world.
Why is a "flee or die" rule any more obscure than a Fortune Point rule, just for an example? I don't know how it will work in the game, but "flee or die" is a solution that many GMs are already using to keep every combat from ending with a pile of corpses. If WFRP3 includes a solid rule for running away before getting killed, I'd be happy to see it.
The "narrative tools" haven't been talked about very much. What I gather is that some dice symbols that come up in your pool will indicate something that can be used to enrich (if that's the right word) the story. Some of your dice will indicate that you successfully hit, while others may indicate that you did so "only by luck" or "with real style" -- or something like that, perhaps.
V3 seems to have inherited some of the same general structure from V2. It might look like a really big leap from the game you already know, they have more in common than you can see at first glance.
4) Why all this talking about "Heroes". In WarHammer heroes aren't born, are forged. All this super-imaging, ultra-armored, highly fantasy draws will remind me of something more ludic and less gritty. From WH I want the mud and the blood. Otherwise I'll choose D&D.
Warhammer has always been about heroes. Go read the back covers to V1 and V2. We play heroes in this game. Hero is not a bad word. I don't know where you're getting the impression that V3 characters start off as anything different than what we've.
There are still Basic Careers. We don't yet know how powerful starting PCs will be in V3. I'll bet you can still play very low-level starting characters.
5) Why the need of specifing that 3rd edition isn't a boardgame. It's and RPG, right?
You must have missed the two days of non-stop ranting about how this is a board game. You've got a lot of catching up to do!
6) Even if FFG has so innovative ideas about a 3rd edition, so revolutionary that can't but put on the market a new product, while not leaving all this boardgame "stuff" optional? If I'm happy enough of bookworming in by 200 books, why don't le me to do so and buy only the books and not the entire package?
Why don't they let you just buy the books? Probably because you need the cards, the dice and the other stuff as an integral part of the play experience FFG wants you to have. This roleplaying game contains lots of parts that are best shipped in a box.
Perhaps because the game IS the package
I hope I'm reading you right! I concerned that V3 may be a game that struggles under the weight and complexity of its own components -- that it's more shine than substance.
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My memory's so muddy now, but someone mentioned that the action cards were two-sided and left me with the impression that they were aggro-stance on one side and cautious-stance on the other.
The action cards we've seen are color-coded red and green. On the Troll Slayer career card, you can see four 'puzzle pieces' which I think are your 'action card slots'. Troll Slayer has three red slots (bold/aggressive-stanced actions?) and one green (cautious/conservative?).
To me, this looks like you'll have a few action cards, and at the beginning of a challenge or scene (or whatever) you might 'load up' your career card (maybe) with your actions, choosing which stance to take for each type of action and working within the limited slots provided by your career. I don't know how or when you choose your stance, and I might be putting together graphical clues that don't really connect.
And if WFRP doesn't do that, I've got a big chunk of a homebrew system already worked out!
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Hemple Huss said:
Side note to DagobahDave can you post the sheets you are taliking about to help with rule.I'd like to share my rules sheets, but because they contain copyrighted material I really can't.
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Tetrarch said:
All i need for an RPG is some dice, a char sheet and my imagination.
I've narrowed it down to needing just one friend.
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BLUE WIZARD: Couldn't they have just made these "reference" cards for WFRP 2?
Some of them, probably. From what I can tell of WFRP3's cards, they're more than just used for reference. There's going to be some kind of tactic-choosing system in which we'll select certain actions instead of others. Each action seems to have two uses, depending on whether you've chosen to play the 'aggressive' side of the card or the 'cautious' side.
It looks gimmicky, like a card-game mechanic, but I think what you're doing is adjusting your character's abilities on the fly. That's pretty cool, and the cards are a neat way to handle it -- because you have all the reference material you need, but you don't have a lot of useless information (the actions you've chosen not to play) in front of you, because those rules on the back-sides of the card faces you're presently using. It's little things like that which make me think that WFRP3 could be cool, and things might fit together a lot more neatly than they appear now.
BLUE WIZARD: Couldn't they just publish a new, more polished edition with new art and updates without an entirely new set of rules that is incompatible with the older material?
We don't know that this is an entirely new set of rules. I've said it a million times already, but I see a lot of things that have been carried over from V2. The attributes and skills have familiar names. The skills list in particular looks very much like the V2 list, with three levels of mastery. The skills list definitely is not the same, since it appears that WS and BS are now skills instead of attributes. We now have just six main (just like D&D, I know) attributes -- Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower, Fellowship.
So it is a different game, but you should notice that I'm using terms you're already familiar with. As long as we can find a common language between V2 and V3, we should be able to convert characters and adventures.
BLUE WIZARD: Is this what RPGs are going to be like from now on: mechanics changing every few years in order to resell the game? Fans forced to buy back in for hundreds of dollars (or whatever currency) every few years or get scalped on Ebay for older version stuff?
It's been going on for a long time now, but I think it's just a reality of the RPG market that companies need to produce new editions every year just to keep a steady stream of revenue from that product line.
No RPG company has forced anyone to buy anything, but I know what you mean.
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If it doesn't come with pencils, it's not a complete game!
For $100 it should come with 4 pencils!
No pencils? What have they done to my RPG?!
Pencils? I thought everything would be on cards!
Somebody help me out here. I'm running out of good ones.
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CRasterImage said:
sense of entitlementSelf-entitlement usually annoys me, but in this case many players have a reason to feel cheated. If you were a loyal customer of WFRP2, that means you could have easily spent $500 on your WFRP2 collection. But we still wanted books of maps, books about Elves and Dwarfs and Greenskins and Undead and books on Tilea and Estalia and lots of others.
When FFG picked up the game, those same loyal customers went into their pockets for another $70 or so for Shades of Empire and the Career Compendium. I don't think many of us realized that the Compendium was WFRP2's swan song, but some folks saw it for what it was. (I didn't.) The last bit of news I remember seeing about WFRP was an errata booklet for the Compendium.
FFG went silent on WFRP for a couple of months, and we started to wonder what was going on. The core rulebook was out of print and nearly impossible to find, and within a couple of weeks of our taking notice of that, FFG announced the first wave of WFRP2 books on PDF. Some people took that to mean that WFRP2 was going to be supported, but there were folks who saw that it was part of the shutting-down of WFRP2.
FFG just didn't tell us what their plans were, and so some of us made purchasing decisions that we might not have, had we been informed of what they certainly already knew.
I can understand why people are upset, and upset at FFG specifically. I think the big picture is more complicated than that, and that Games Workshop as the licensor may have been involved with those decisions, too. It's easier for me to believe that GW tied somebody's hands than it is to think that FFG would mislead its fans to the point where there's such deep-felt hurt over the new edition.
That's how I see it, anyway.
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All I meant to say about WAR is that it's still a game in which you start of pretty low (relative to the game's overall power levels). You've got thirty-nine levels to look up to.
I would have preferred a much grimmer, grittier MMO than WAR. I wanted to scrape up money working odd jobs until I could afford a hovel, and then I wanted to figure out ways to secure my stuff from thieves -- like getting a strongbox and locks, or paying a street urchin to watch my place while I'm out catching rats. I wanted the game to provide me with logical, natural situations that forced me to go out and be adventurous -- just so I could make sure when I got home that there was something to eat and enough firewood. What I wanted was almost, but not quite, Sims: Meet The Grims.
From the look of the goblins and coachman scenario, WFRP3 could default to about the same starting level as the WFRP I'm familiar with. If it's a notch higher, I'll probably be fine with it.
I thought I could make out career cards for 'Apprentice Wizard' and 'Wizard' displayed in the photos taken at GenCon. Sounds like there's at least one step from the bottom to the middle. I'm sure there's a Wizard Lord in there somewhere. Probably in the Adventurer's Toolkit.
I wonder if it's possible to start as a higher-career character that somehow trades off speed and agility (because you're old) with experience and precision (because you've learned to get it right every time, if you take the time). So you've got your Wizard who's wise and can throw a mean fireball, but he's fragile and doesn't fare well in hand-to-hand. In the same party you've got an Apprentice Wizard who only knows a couple of minor spells but has the strength and speed of youth, and can actually hold his own in sword fight.
I could really go for something like that.
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Necronomicus said:
In warhammer online you start out a bright wizard!!!! A hight elf mage!@!!! things that in the WFRP 1/2 ed would take a long time to acheive.Have you played it?
WAR starts you off pretty low on the social ladder. It has the same 'start at the bottom' philosophy of WFRP. You have a limited number of abilites to start with, and you gradually pick up lots more.
WAR doesn't offer career changes in the same way as WFRP, so you don't start as a Bounty Hunter on your path to becoming a Witch Hunter. You just start off as a new Witch Hunter who isn't very good at anything, so you work your way up. Essentially it's a lot like WFRP. And it looks like WFRP3 has basic careers just like WFRP, so presumably they'll also have advanced careers to work your way into.
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Captin' said:
You mean like including a GM screen?The WFRP2 GM's screen has some of what I need, but it doesn't have full spell lists and descriptions, the full list of talents (which I refer to a lot) or Tzeentch's Curse. So the GM screen helps, but to save time and for ease of play I pieced together the other frequently-used pages and tables from different parts of the rulebook onto cheat-sheets. Otherwise I'd be flipping pages a lot.
Also, the GM's screen contains information I think the players should have access to. The actions summary on the WFRP2 character sheet doesn't really help. If you're a magic-user, you have to copy down the spell list by hand or grab one one of those nifty spell cards that some fans have put together for WFRP2. As a longtime roleplayer I'm used to doing that, but I'll be glad if I don't have to -- so long as the game still promotes great Warhammer roleplaying.
But like I wrote earlier, it's just taking the idea of reference sheets to the next step.
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To me, the FFG guys are making it sound like there's only one extra set of player's dice or cards or sheets or whatever -- plus some career cards and other stuff that are probably intended to be shared by the group.
But I've also heard one GenCon-goer say that the AT lets you add several more players (but might include only one new character-keeper box?). Guess we just gotta wait for clarification.
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Captin' said:
Look what up in the book?
I have bookmarks in my V2 rulebook at pages 96 (Talents), 105 (Weapon Qualities), 126 (Actions), 134 (Critical Hits), 143 (Tzeentch's Curse Tables), 156 (Lore of Metal practiced by one of our PCs), all of which I may need to refer to in a single round. To make things easier, I've created cheat-sheets of lots of those tables so that I don't have to flip through the books.
WFRP3 seems to have taken that idea to the next logical step, maybe saving me from having to make any cheat-sheets. (But I think using the cards is going to be cooler than that because of the choice of stances.)
A question for the Captin', if I may
in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
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lordsneek said:
After a few heart pounding seconds the party sees no danger and heads on to Middenhiem. Suddenly an arrow is fired from out no where. I resolve a surprise round and hand one of my players a wound card. A few moments later more bandits arrive and the party is overrun, but the question is: will they survive?
That's very much what I'm expecting. I might run my campaign with a little different tone, or take more time to get to the fighting, or maybe only fight once in a great while, but I can't imagine that WFRP doing anything but what you described. It's a vehicle for telling stories, first and foremost. The cards are like character sheets, only more versatile.
We have no reason to assume that V3 will be a game that jumps from one combat scene to the next. I think that's an unfounded fear. But to some extent, the rules can dictate to us just how important it is to be a good fighter or a good talker in this game, thereby influencing our gameplay. If we only had one social skill, we'd be finding all sorts of nuanced ways to kill. If you only have one form of attack, you really need a wide selection of social skills so that you can avoid fights or make sure you fight for the right reasons.
The balance in V2 is a good -- lots of social skills and talents, but plenty of combat-related ones, too. If we're lucky, V3 will strike a similar balance.