Be my guest. It's absolutely free for your personal use. And frankly, I ought to reread that post myself. Yesterday one of my players used magic sight on a building that was not enchanted at all, and my response to him was "yeah, it checks out, there's no evil magic here". While that was true and kept the plot from bogging down, it certainly wasn't as colorful or interesting as anything I wrote in that old post.

In that situation, I would apply exactly 1 white die to the roll to represent the condition. To my eyes, the rules seem to imply that's how it works. Per pages 50-51 of the Player's Guide (and again on Pages 76-77 and 83), the GM is always free to add fortune or misfortune dice to a pool to reflect the task being easier or harder than normal. Typically you add 1 white or black per miscellaneous advantage or disadvantage the character has. If you look at the opposed check rules (Player's Guide, page 52), you'll find another precedent implying this is the way to do it. Skill training, specializations, and A/C/E all generally add white or yellow when used for an action, but if used by the target of an opposed check they add an equal number of black instead. The implied converse of that would be that if there's anything in play that would normally penalize the target's actions by black or purple, it should probably add an equal number of white to the active players opposed check instead. It's not technically official, but it's certainly in keeping with the spirit and implications of the rules.

Why would Improved Dodge only add 1 soak? Improved Dodge replaces Dodge. DurakBlackaxe was referring to this bit of text from the blast rule: The rules boost soak per die, with no accounting for whether that die is black or purple. It's a little silly. If you have Coordination trained, Dodge will add +2 soak (from +2 black dice) vs a blast, but Improved Dodge technically only adds +1 soak (from the +1 purple die it provides) vs a blast. Which unfortunately means that Advanced Dodge (from Hero's Call) also only provides +1 soak vs a blast, despite it adding a purple die + a challenge symbol + a bane to normal attacks.

That's what I expected it to do for us, but it always backfired. Cool that it performs as intended at your table.

No, but really Yes. Upgrading from 1 or 2 black to 1 purple will only minimally impact how often you get hit... but it will help in other ways. Remember that attacks are not binary pass/fail in nature. The attack roll is also the damage roll. While Improved Dodge will rarely cancel the attack entirely, it may downgrade the effect or wreck the attacker. One thing that might not be obvious from the player's perspective is that many of the monster actions include a chaos star (or multiple bane) result that's devastating and/or hilarious. Adding an extra purple doesn't just mean the attack is less likely to hurt the PC, it's also more likely the monster will hurt itself and its allies. If a goblin henchman rolls a chaos star, hilarity ensues and the fight scene gets about a turn shorter. Beyond that, remember that Improved defenses all have some sort of extra effect for when the attack actually does miss. Whether or not the card is worth the XP depends at least partly on whether or not your build can take advantage of that extra effect. I wouldn't bother with Improved Parry for a Wizard or a Priest. Not all characters will reliably have something meaningful to do with the bonus maneouvre granted by Improved Dodge, but a character armed with a blackpowder weapon will love it. The "Hero's Call" supplement added a third tier to the defenses, so there's an Advanced Parry, Advanced Block and Advanced Dodge cards available. They seem pretty strong to me, enough so that I think they are worth both upgrade investments, even if you were on the fence about the Improved version that precedes them.

Nope, I'm sorry, but that's not how it works. If you read the card, you'll see that Dodge says it adds misfortune "to the action's dice pool", not to your defence. For Opposed checks you compare Characteristics. If your Fellowship is higher than their Willpower, the difficulty is only 1d, just like a normal attack. It doesn't get to 2d unless their Willpower is equal to your Fellowship. Your typical greenskin, beastman, cultist or soldier has Willpower 3. If your relevant Characteristic is 4+, the opposed check actions remain just as good as normal attacks against most foes, and against some weaker foes they're actually better. If your relevant Characteristic is 2 or 3, then yes the opposed check action will suck for you (regardless of whether or not dodge enters the picture).

I'm curious, how well has that worked out for you and your group? I tried it with my group for several sessions, hoping it would inspire my players to spend more fortune points and be more epic/cinematic, and it actually had the opposite effect. In the 3 or 4 sessions we used that house-rule, I believe a single fortune point got spent once. Again and again the players would look at the results sitting in front of them, and realize that they'd need 2 more successes (or boons) to actually make a meaningful change, so they'd decide it wasn't worth it. After we reverted to the default rules, they started spending them again. YMMV, and if so I'd love to hear about it.

I would generally characterize that as an Action. Getting an NPC to share information with you is "Influencing the Target". You're interacting with and manipulating them into telling you the juicy gossip. The only way I'd see that as being merely a manoeuvre would be in situations where the GM was using an exceptionally long turn length. Like maybe during the travel sections of The Enemy Within, where a single die roll was determining the outcome of several days worth of journey. Traveling would be your main action, and if the players wanted to accomplish anything else on the side they'd do so at the cost of being fatigued when they arrived at their destination. In those situations, though, everything recharge-related gets mechanically wonky, so you're probably better off splitting each day up into several turns in the first place.

Either the Pistolier career card or the Knight career card (don't remember which) indicates that mostly Knightly orders recruit from the Pistoliers. I'm not sure if that's a change from the original fluff or not, but it seems to indicate that the medieval esquiring system is not the norm within the Empire. Maybe if they do a Brettonian box we'll get squires.

I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation there. Parry says it can be used against any Melee Attack, which is a pretty broad category of cards. Block says any Melee or Ranged Attack. Niether of them mention only working on actions that use Target Defence. The card type (determined by the icon in the upper left corner) seems to be all that matters. Dodge does mention Target Defence, but the way the sentence is written I've always parsed it as any Melee Attack, or any Ranged Attack, or the specific subset of Spells that target defence. That's not the same as Melee Attacks vs target defence, Ranged attacks vs target defence, and Spells vs target defence. I'm pretty sure if they meant the later, the conjunctions and punctuation would have been placed elsewhere in the sentence. That's my take on it, anyway.

The Player's Guide is riddled with new information not found in the original core rules. Most of it is in sidebars explaining why things work the way they do and how you might patch or house-rule things that are a little iffy in the original rules. For example, there's a suggestion that PCs be required to spend at least four advances in a career before switching to a new career, to limit the ability to cherry-pick specific advancement types. In another part of the book they reccommend the GM limit any healing spell to once per day per target. Those are the two patches with the greatest impact, but there's lots of other little things that will make it worth your time to read it. It's a $50 book with probably less than 3 pages of new content, so I won't claim it's necessarily worth the money, but it's certainly game-changing and useful. I haven't picked up the Game Master's Guide yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also has hidden easter eggs in the forms of optional rules and GMing advice. I mean, if the Player's Guide had GM advice in it, then hopefully the GM's Guide will too. I'm currently planning to buy it soon to find out for certain. Fingers crossed and hoping I won't regret it. The only Vault I've bought is the Creature Vault. I found it to be extremely useful and helpful. Well worth the money. It did feature some redundancy with cards that already existed, but surprisingly little overlap. Some of the early products (like the Tome of Adventure in the Core Set) didn't always put everything on card that they probably should have, and this vault fixed that. I didn't pick up the Creature Guide though, because I had the 2nd Edition equivalent and know the setting pretty well. Problem is, the Vault, as printed, wasn't initially completely usable without the Guide. Some of the monsters had keyworded abilities listed on their cards, which weren't explained on them. FFG did eventually release an FAQ that explained those keywords, so if you pick up the vault, make sure you've got the latest version of the FAQ. My understanding is that the Player's Vault includes fixed versions of the core set cards that have received errata. Other than that it's just reprints, as is the GM's Vault. Personally I passed on both of them. If you've got access to a color printer, the errata cards can be found on FFG's website. If you pick up any of those products, make sure you download the latest FAQ and Errata document. In addition to the missing explanation of keywords in the creature vault, all three of the guides are chock full of typos. The FAQ is a must. Assuming you're not getting the Vaults, you probably should pick up the Toolkits. The Player's Toolkit has some really good careers and actions. The GM's Toolkit includes a book with a lot of optional rules and discussion. Good stuff.

It's in the hard-bound Player's Guide, and the suggestion is sadly a mere 4 advances. 5 would be a better rule, IMHO, given that there are careers (Mystic, Commoner, and Scribe all spring to mind) that provide 3 or 4 of a single Advance type. If you're willing to slum for fortune advances, there's nothing holding you back. That is less than ideal given that Education is an advanced skill. In order to be literate, you must Acquire Education, which costs 4 advances if it's non-career. If you can find a career transition that costs 0 to 1, it'll be cheaper to career hop. Which brings up a tangential question... why the heck is literacy so darned expensive? Seems like there ought to at least be "Barely-Literate" Talent available for those who want it.

Emirikol said: Do characters actually get any tougher as they advance? If characters already have a high % chance to succeed at things (approaching 86%), does advancing actually make them any 'tougher' in a typical campaign?' I definitely think so. Sure, your chance of scoring a one-hammer basic success was already 80%+ at character creation, but the overall quality of the roll really impacts the damage dealt. Success is not binary in this game. Even something as broken as Reckless Cleave isn't particularly great when your total results pool is a single success… you want 3 successes, 2 comets and at least 3 boons (assuming a weapon with CR:2) to trigger everything that attack can give you. High-end results like that don't happen very often at Rank 1, but become more reliable as you pile additional dice on top. The answer to your question also depends a bit on whether or not your group has access to all the supplements. Hero's Call and Omens of War added some good stuff, such as Enhance cards and Epic talents. If you don't have those sets (or haven't looked closely at the cards they included) then you may be missing out on some really solid late-game options.

Yepesnopes said: Shouldn't be more difficult to hit with a ranged weapon to someone who is prone? That's a good point. I probably need to revise it to add a black to ranged attacks at Long and Extreme range. The main way to end up prone is from various actions that knock the target prone when the attacker gets a good role, so I want to make sure it remains primarily a penalty to the person who is prone. Realistically, at point-blank range laying on the ground is more likely to set you up for an execution than make you a difficult target. Point-blank in this game is Close, not Engaged, because most ranged attack cards say they can't be used if you're engaged. So that's why I included the fortune die on close range attacks. Emirikol said: I think there is a scorched card which may be similar to your on fire card. Scorched mirrors one part of the fire effects on the various location cards, but not all of them, and has some weird mechanical interactions that I think make it less than ideal. I should have mentioned this in my original post… there's a reason why my Too Close To The Flames card says "Likely effects of a burning environment" instead of "Dependent Effect". I don't really intend to apply it like a condition card. It's more like a cheat-sheet so the Bright Wizard in our group can get an estimate of the effects if he used Cantrip or some other spell to set a building on fire. I don't generally let my players flip through the unused location cards, but I wanted the Bright Wizard to have at least a rough idea of the strategic application of fire.

Cross-posted from my blog 'cause I'm too lazy to dream up entirely new things to say about these cards. Here's 4 and a half Condition cards I made for my table because I felt their absence from the core set was troubling. All were created using the Hurlanc and Liber Fanatica 7 extensions for Strange Eons. Darkness Warhammer has specific rules for actions taken in darkness. Such actions get a whole bunch of black penalty dice added to them. This should totally have been put on a card in the core set, so I made one: To the left is my first draft, which faithfully summarizes the official rules. To the right you'll find my revised version. I swapped out two of the misfortune dice for one purple die in cases where there's literally no light. It better matches the penalty from the Blinded condition, and also provides for an increased chance of rolling Chaos Stars, which is the symbol that generates all the hilarious fall-off-the-side-of-the-location-card effects scattered throughout various Warhammer encounters. For the record, I totally would have started the purple dice much earlier on that list if not for the existence of the Dwarven and Elven racial ability. The night vision possessed by those two character races cancels two black dice from darkness penalties, but has no impact on purple dice. If not for that, every instance of two black on that card would be replaced with a purple. Prone There's a few points where the rules discuss what it means to be knocked prone. Standing up from being knocked prone officially costs a manoeuvre. Elsewhere in the rules they suggest you might apply fortune or misfortune dice to rolls involving prone individuals, but leave the specifics up to the GM. As flexible and vague as that is, is it would be rather helpful to have at least the minimum effects put on a Condition card for easy reference. So I made exactly that. I included a specific statement that you can't change locations while prone. That seemed the most elegant way to restrict crawling, which officially has no rules. Per the books only common sense stops you from running while prone. Fire After much searching the books, I could only conclude that Warhammer 3rd doesn't actually have any official fire rules. There are, however, a number of location cards for things like burning buildings, barges and cities. Each time an adventure needed to take place inside or adjacent to a fire, they made a card to capture the feel of it. They aren't quite uniform, but they have a few commonalities. They usually slowly load you up on Fatigue points, sometimes give you minor penalties on your actions, and if you roll Chaos Stars near a fire it may well result in actual wounds. The upshot of this is that I could reverse-engineer some baseline effects for standing in or near a major fire. Since I have a Bright Wizard in my party, this seemed worth putting on a generic reference card. Non-Lethal Damage Warhammer 3rd has no official rules for pulling your punches or dealing non-lethal damage. A number of GMs have attempted to address this specifically with custom actions or house-rules that inflict fatigue points instead of wounds. This runs into problems, though, as Fatigue and Wounds are mechanically very different. PCs are generally KO'd much faster by fatigue than wounds, and per the default rules NPCs don't take fatigue. My version of the card is a voluntary effect. The main effect is that it cancels your critical hits on any attack that gets no Chaos Stars. As it turns out, the normal healing rules are very generous, so once the fight is over normal wounds feel like non-lethal damage. Critical wounds take longer to heal, and are also what determines whether or not a KO'd character actually dies. As long as you take zero crits, you can technically survive an infinite number of normal wounds. I kept the side-effects of the card pretty minimal, so it'd be worth using when the situation warrants. It adds a misfortune die and reduces damage by 1, just to pay lip service to the notion that you're intentionally not giving it your all.

Ripple effects you might want to keep an eye out for with Phild's proposed house-rule in play: Spellcasters will be boosted more than non-casters. Chaos stars are extra bad for wizards, and thanks to quick-casting they see more challenge dice than most other characters. Wizards will be very happy to trade out a lowly blue to eliminate a purple. Cards that are "balanced" by bane- or chaos-star-triggered drawbacks will get a boost. This may require more vigilance from the GM to keep those cards in check. In other words, think twice before letting your player's choose and resolve their own banes. First Aid checks will be much stronger in Phild's system. They and any of the other non-standard rolls where the total number of successes dictates the strength of the result (instead of just aiming for a 2- or 3-success plateau) will be boosted more by your rule than rolls that follow the default action-card structure. Using the optional "Higher Lethality" rule from the GM's Toolkit will alleviate this disparity, but also increase damage in the late campaign. The intoxicated condition is mildly undermined. No big deal. The math behind these ripple effects follows… phild said: Reducing Fortune / Misfortune keeps things a bit more random, as the dice sets match and so the more fo them there are, the more the result will cluster towards the mean. While that's certainly how the bell curve of a handful of normal numbered dice works, it's not actually what happens when you add more fortune and misfortune dice. Instead of pushing the results towards the mean, to some extent they actually push away. IMHO, the interactions of the white and black dice are one of the coolest things about Warhammer's mechanics. In most other games, shooting from high ground in the rain (or any other combination of relatively equal positive and negative modifiers) is always a boring +0 net, but in warhammer those two equal but competing modifiers have 7 possible results. +1/+0, +0/+1, +1/-1, +0/+0, -1/+1, +0/-1 and -1/+0 are all completely viable and meaningfully different results from 1 white and 1 black. Paired fortune and misfortune dice actually increase the odds of the least likely outcomes showing up. I'll illustrate with some sample dice pools. 4 characteristic and 1 challenge: 1+ success: 72% 3+ success: 17% 2+ boons: 20% 2+ banes: 4% 4 characteristic and 1 challenge PLUS 4 Fortune and 4 Misfortune 1+ success: 66% 3+ success: 25% 2+ boons: 28% 2+ banes: 8% Adding four each of white and black reduced the chance of the least interesting / most common result (simple success with no boons or banes). The odds of getting interesting results lines like triple-success, double-boon or double-bane all went up, which is pretty cool. Let's look at the effects on a larger dice pool… 3 conservative, 2 characteristic, 3 expertise and 3 challenge: 1+ success: 84% 3+ success: 53% 5+ success: 20% 2+ boons: 63% 3+ boons: 41% 2+ banes: 3% 3+ banes: 1% 3 conservative, 2 characteristic, 3 expertise and 3 challenge PLUS 8 Fortune and 8 Misfortune: 1+ success: 75% 3+ success: 36% 5+ success: 3% 2+ boons: 59% 3+ boons: 41% 2+ banes: 7% 3+ banes: 3% In this case, the "clustering towards the mean" does exist but only in regards to the odds of scoring very large numbers of successes. Again the odds of scoring boons and banes have actually gone up. A larger portion of the actions in the game feature interesting effects for scoring a multiple boons or banes than for scoring 5 instead of 3 successes, so this larger pool will effectively provide more diverse results (unless you use the "Higher Lethality" optional rule from the GMs toolkit). In your system that last dice pool would be converted to: 3 conservative, 1 characteristic, 3 expertise , 2 challenge, 1 Fortune and 1 Misfortune: 1+ success: 88% 3+ success: 58% 5+ success: 21% 2+ boons: 66% 3+ boons: 43% 2+ banes: 2% 3+ banes: 0.3% Overall success rate is up, and the potential for a roll that succeeds but at a cost (lots of banes or chaos stars) is greatly diminished. Chaos Stars drop from 33% likelihood on 3 purple to 23% on 2 purple. To me that seems less dramatic… but YMMV. If that works for you and your group, great, that's all that matters.

I really like the idea of not rolling for henchmen and just assume a failure, as it's very elegant and easy at the table. I've run some numbers, and if you just assume each group of henchmen will take wounds equal to the Fear rating of the PC, it seems like it will work okay. Eliminating the die roll and just inflicting a wound makes Fear more consistent and guarantees minor success, but rules-out the possibility of Fear ever being a devastating major effect. If you're rolling for the NPCs, Fear 1 will usually be no big deal, but every once in a blue moon it will completely wreck someone. This is because two banes are much worse than failure on most Fear checks. On a Fear 1 check, Failure means just 1 stress (or wound), which is usually not a big deal. Double-banes means 1 stress (or wound) per turn, plus a reduction of all the victim's future dice pools. A pretty typical henchman Discipline pool would be 1 red, 2 blue, and 1 white vs 1 purple (assuming Fear 1). 30% chance to fail, and only a 7% chance for double-banes. About 1 roll in 200 will both fail and also generates the 2 banes. That's pretty unreliable, but when it happens it would be pretty memorable. r_b_bergstrom said: If I unleash my Fear 1 during a scene where they're facing off against 2 groups of 4 henchmen each, how many willpower tests should the GM make? 8 individual tests? 2 tests and (if failed) apply the stress (which would be a wound) to each henchman individually? (Total 4 wounds per group) 2 tests but if failed only apply the stress (wound) to a single henchman per test? (Only 1 wound per group) The results for each of those three approaches would be: Method A: 8 individual tests. Average effect: 3 wounds split randomly between the two groups. Chance of zero wounds overall: ~2.5% Chance of 8 or more wounds overall: <1%. 8 rolls for 3 wounds is a lot of time and energy invested for not much payoff. Method B: 2 tests, results applied to every henchman in the group Average effect: 3 wounds, all suffered by a single group. Chance of zero wounds overall: ~40% Chance of 8 or more wounds overall: ~14%. I could live with Method B. It's fast, and does roughly the same average "damage" as rolling individually. It is, however, very swingy. Method B Fear does not nibble away at Henchmen, it either ignores them entirely or takes huge ravenous bites out of them. That makes balancing encounters a little harder, so the GM should be prepared for it. Method C: 2 tests, results applied to a single henchman per group. Average effect: 1 wound to a single group. Chance of zero wounds overall: ~40% Chance of 8 or more wounds overall: 0%. This method really reduces the overall power of PC actions that generate Fear checks for NPCs. If you use this method, those actions and talents might not be worth the XP they cost. To that we could add two different versions of the not rolling, for comparison: Method D: No Roll, each group takes wounds equal to Fear rating. Average effect: 2 wounds, 1 per group. Chance of zero wounds overall: 0% Chance of 8 or more wounds overall: 0%. A small reduction in average effect from rolling 8 times, but it's fast and elegant. Fear 1 would be reliable and consistent, but not very potent. Method E: No Roll, each individual henchman takes wounds equal to Fear rating. Average effect: 8 wounds total, 4 per group, 1 per individual henchman. Chance of zero wounds overall: 0% Chance of 8 or more wounds overall: 100%. This would absolutely devestate henchmen. Could work for a very cinematic campaign, but I think it might get out of hand if the PCs figure out how to boost their rating to Fear 3 or Terror 2. Method D is tempting for its elegence, but I'm probably going to use Method B instead. Method B, with the clarification that If a group gets the frightened condition, each henchman will 1 wound per turn. This effectively puts the whole group on a 3- or 4- turn (depending on Toughness) self-destruct countdown. If a group is eliminated in this way, it will usually be narrated as a spectacular morale failure not literal death from fear. They surrender, flee, dissert, trample or betray each other as appropriate. Odds calculations on the two rolls used by Methods B and C when facing 2 groups of henchmen with willpower 3, fortune 1, stance 1: ~40% chance of both groups being unaffected. ~38% chance of 1 group failing and the other being unaffected. 9% chance of both groups failing. ~9% of 1 group getting the frightened condition and the other being unaffected ~4% chance of one group failing and the other gaining frightened <1% chance of both groups getting frightened.

Personally, I'd do boons as first tie-breaker, and compare Agility (or Fellowship in a social encounter) only if boons were also tied. I also imagine that the Party Tension Meter would be moving a lot, unless the competition was essentially playful. Depending on the nature of the PC vs PC struggle, I might not let them use the talent slots or power on the Party card either. If they're both wooing the same NPC, or it's an argument or actual fight between the PCs then every action would move the Tension Meter, and they wouldn't get to use their team powers. If instead it was something like a chess match or a foot race between the PCs, I'd probably only move the tension meter as a 2-bane or chaos star result… but such light-hearted situations are also rarely worth rolling initiative over in the first place. EDIT: I just remembered that there's a precedent in the rules for Competetive checks where the person in Reckless stance wins ties. Page 52 to 53 of the Player's Guide. I'm not sure it's relevant to an Initiative check, but it's arguably the closest thing to official word on the subject.

Per the rules (it's a little vague in the core book, but the FAQ addresses it directly) the "standard one purple" is only for actions that say "vs Target Defence". When it's vs some other skill+characteristic combo, the minimum difficulty could be nothing. The total difficulty for Coordinated Strike is based on the PCs Fellowship vs the target's Willpower, plus one additional black die as listed on the upper left corner of the card. This uses the chart on page 43 of the core rules, or page 52 of the player's guide. So it's best against low Willpower targets. Goblins and chaos spawn are easy to Coordinate against, but you're better off using a basic melee attack against a Chaos Warrior. If you have just a mediocre Fellowship, the difficulty will often be quite high, especially against boss monsters and Nemesis NPCs. Fellowship 3 vs Willpower 2: 3 blue, 1 yellow vs 1 purple + 1 black. 64% hit chance. (Target is Goblin, Snotling, Fury or Chaos Spawn) Fellowship 3 vs Willpower 3: 3 blue, 1 yellow vs 2 purple + 1 black. 45% hit chance. (Most targets) Fellowship 3 vs Willpower 4 or 5: 3 blue, 1 yellow vs 3 purple + 1 black. 31% hit chance. (Target is River Troll, Rat Ogre, or Chaos Warrior) Fellowship 3 vs Willpower 6+: 3 blue, 1 yellow vs 4 purple + 1 black. 20% hit chance. The odds numbers get much better if the acting PC has an exceptional Fellowship. Fellowship 6 vs Willpower 2: 6 blue, 1 yellow vs 1 black. (No purple!) 97% hit chance. (Target is Goblin, Snotling, Fury or Chaos Spawn) Fellowship 6 vs Willpower 3, 4 or 5: 6 blue, 1 yellow vs 1 purple + 1 black. 88% hit chance. (Nearly all other targets) Fellowship 6 vs Willpower 6: 6 blue, 1 yellow vs 2 purple + 1 black. 75% hit chance. Fellowship 6 vs Willpower 7 to 11: 6 blue, 1 yellow vs 3 purple + 1 black. 60% hit chance. Fellowship 6 vs Willpower 12+ (ain't gonna happen): 6 blue, 1 yellow vs 4 purple + 1 black. 47% hit chance.

I ended up cancelling the session because of needing to take a cat to an emergency (really disgusting but not life-threatening) vet visit. So I've got another week to consider if I want to alter the numbers, or just ad-lib off the most basic structure of the tracker as you guys did. I really like having the progress meters so that success or failure is totally up to the PC's actions and abilities, not simply left to GM fiat. When the trackers are 8 to 12 spaces long and only move one step towards disaster per turn, though, that's effectively a snail-paced auto-win for a group of 4 PCs. No tension, no drama, just a lot of filler.

It's a normal action, and in no way impairs the allied character's ability to attack on their turn. If it did, that would be mentioned directly on the card. You can visualize it as one character creating an opportunity for the other to attack, one person being a feint, both acting at the same time, or even one person shoving the foe towards the other person's weapon. In terms of flavor, it's like the ally getting an extra action… but mechanically it's just a normal action from the person who has the Coordinated Strike card (not the ally). The point of the action is to allow for a "non-combat" PC to sometimes score a big hit despite having a crappy strength and probably not such a great weapon. But the game designers don't want this to steal the spotlight from the more combat-focused PCs, so they made the action dependent on the melee PC being nearby, and you use 1 or more of the melee-focused PCs stats to calculate the damage. That's pretty clever game design, IMHO. Yepesnopes said: He has to have a melee weapon equipped and he has to be engaged with an ally, let's call him PC_B (although it can be an NPC as well, as long as he is an ally it is ok). PC_B has to have a weapon equipped as well. And finally, PC_A has to be engaged with the target, let's say Orc_1. He then performs the skill check listed on the card; that is PC_A rolls Leadership versus PC_1 Discipline. To clarify, the roll is vs Orc_1's Discipline, not a PC's discipline. You roll vs the Target, not vs the Ally, but you must be in the same engagement as both of them. Orc_1 takes the damage. So PC_A rolls his own Leadership vs Orc_1's Discipline. If he hits, he'll use either PC_B's strength and PC_A's weapon, or PC_A's Strength and PC_B's weapon, depending on which side of the card he's rolling. If you roll 2 eagles on the red side, you get the strength from both PC_A and PC_B added to the DR of PC_B's weapon. Which sounds awesome, but presumably PC_A's Fellowship is higher than his Strength (or else he'd take card like Reckless Cleave instead of Coordinated Strike) so it's not as amazing as it sounds.

There are multiple action cards (etc) that grant a PC Fear 1 for a few turns, or grant Fear 1 to a single attack. We've got a PC with "Fear Me!" at my table and it hasn't been terribly potent so far… but that may have just been bad rolls. If a creature or person has Fear 1, the rules state others have to test when they first encounter that character. If you spend multiple turns interacting with them, the rules seem pretty clear that you only roll once. Assuming that's the case, do these effects seem worth it to you? I'm tempted to make the victims roll again if they try to engage the Feared person, or maybe even every time the Fearsome person attacks them personally, but I'm worried it might make it too good. It may not be a problem with Fear 1, but I imagine it would prove troubling if the effect generated Terror 3 instead and I'd like any potential house-rule to work across the board. If an attack has Fear 1, does that affect: only the specific target of the attack? everyone in the same engagement? all foes regardless of positioning as long as there's a reasonable chance of them seeing it? everyone in the scene, including friendlies? If someone uses the same "the attack has Fear 1" action on multiple turns, should the targets roll the subsequent times? My gut says yes, but I'm having a hard time rectifying that against the Fear rating of a monster (or PC) being something you only roll for once. If I unleash my Fear 1 during a scene where they're facing off against 2 groups of 4 henchmen each, how many willpower tests should the GM make? 8 individual tests? 2 tests and (if failed) apply the stress (which would be a wound) to each henchman individually? (Total 4 wounds per group) 2 tests but if failed only apply the stress (wound) to a single henchman per test? (Only 1 wound per group) Also, in the cases of making only 2 tests, should those tests gain the bonus 3 white dice that the group of 4 henchman would on it's single attack or other active check? There's a lot open to GM interpretation in these situations, and I'm curious how others handle them.

For those of you who've already run the Hedge Maze sequence in the new The Enemy Within: Does the math of it work out okay? Did your heroes save lives in the nick of time, resolve it too fast and easy, or never have a chance? Did you have to house-rule anything to make it work? As written, it's a 12-turn progress tracker, the key NPC has an "easily distracted" trait, and characters with answer for the fatigue can make a lot of manoeuvres per turn. The math on the tracker doesn't look so hot to me, but I'd be curious to hear how it turned out in play. I find that most progress trackers in WFRP are longer than I'd like, so I'm wary of it. Both trackers on the Arson scene were long enough for a party of 4 to focus on one at a time but still solve both problems in succession. I've run fights using the Chaos and Clan Eshin Assassin group sheets, and both times the relevant counters on those sheets didn't get even half way before the battles were over. I'm of course OK with the PCs winning / saving the day, but I want there to be at least a little dramatic tension. One of our PCs has Intelligence 5 + a Fortune Die and Observation Trained. Another PC has the "X marks the spot" blessing, and the scenario notes give them a map. I imagine they'll do a remarkable job tracking and spotting. I'm running the Day 8 party in tommorrow's session, so last-minute warnings and advice would be very helpful.

**Cross-posted from another thread to save me the trouble of typing something similar here** I wouldn't go the route of converting wounds into fatigue. Four reasons: PCs are KO'd by fatigue faster than they are by damage. With toughness 3, it takes 13 wounds to KO you, but only 7 fatigue to do so. Converting normal damage into fatigue doesn't make it "softer", it actually makes it more immediately debilitating. Most NPCs don't actually take Fatigue anyway. Their fatigue is converted into damage, so converting damage into fatigue to make it non-lethal ends up in a weird paradox that ultimately only complicates things. Normal wounds heal super-fast in Warhammer 3rd. An average human will recover from 3 to 6 wounds per day without any medical attention (just a good night's rest), which is roughly 25% to 50% of the number or wounds it takes to KO them. First Aid and Medicine checks can greatly improve this healing rate. If you're KO'd but not actually killed, you'll be fully healed in 3 or 4 days, even without medicine or magic. Only Critical wounds count for determining if you die or not, and it takes several of them to do it. 4 total to kill an average human who's been KO'd. Most crits are caused by things the players can self-limit to one extent or another. (If you want to reduce the crits you're inflicting, simply use your comets for redundant successes and always spend boons on non-crit effects first.) For my group, I made a Condition card called "Pulling Your Punches". It's voluntary, and only uses a Condition card so that we'd have a visual reminder of how it works. The card effect reads: "Add a Misfortune die to your attacks. Unless you roll a Chaos Star, your attacks do not cause criticals (including the one normally inflicted when a target is KO'd)." I considered all sorts of ways to complicate that card further and make it more "realistic", but found this to be elegant and functional enough. Taking care not to kill your target should logically be harder than attacking normally, but not so hard that the PCs are always better off just killing everyone. Note that as written, the condition works equally as well for punches, pommel strikes, or even shooting someone in a non-vital area. Apply common sense as needed.

I wouldn't go the route of converting wounds into fatigue. Four reasons: PCs are KO'd by fatigue faster than they are by damage. With toughness 3, it takes 13 wounds to KO you, but only 7 fatigue to do so. Converting normal damage into fatigue doesn't make it "softer", it actually makes it more immediately debilitating. Most NPCs don't actually take Fatigue anyway. Their fatigue is converted into damage, so converting damage into fatigue to make it non-lethal ends up in a weird paradox that ultimately only complicates things. Normal wounds heal super-fast in Warhammer 3rd. An average human will recover from 3 to 6 wounds per day without any medical attention (just a good night's rest), which is roughly 25% to 50% of the number or wounds it takes to KO them. First Aid and Medicine checks can greatly improve this healing rate. If you're KO'd but not actually killed, you'll be fully healed in 3 or 4 days, even without medicine or magic. Only Critical wounds count for determining if you die or not, and it takes several of them to do it. 4 total to kill an average human who's been KO'd. Most crits are caused by things the players can self-limit to one extent or another. (If you want to reduce the crits you're inflicting, simply use your comets for redundant successes and always spend boons on non-crit effects first.) For my group, I made a Condition card called "Pulling Your Punches". It's voluntary, and only uses a Condition card so that we'd have a visual reminder of how it works. The card effect reads: "Add a Misfortune die to your attacks. Unless you roll a Chaos Star, your attacks do not cause criticals (including the one normally inflicted when a target is KO'd)." I considered all sorts of ways to complicate that card further and make it more "realistic", but found this to be elegant and functional. Taking care not to kill your target should logically be harder than attacking normally, but not so hard that the PCs are always better off just killing everyone. Note that as written, the condition works equally as well for punches, pommel strikes, or even shooting someone in a non-vital area. Apply common sense as needed.