I can see uses for both of these styles in any one's game. On the one hand you have the battle mat layout which is good for dungeons and other confined spaces, and on the other hand you have the abstract method which can be useful if you're fighting out in the open on a road or in a forest glade, etc.

When I get around to running my game, I'm not going to limit myself to one or the other, but instead try to use both as I see fit. After playing 4e D&D though I have no desire to go back to using healing surges or anything like those. I found that they end up triggering a yo-yo effect where you have PC's that have their hit points go up and down repeatedly throughout the combat. In addition, I have seen PC's get knocked out only to spring back to life in the next round with almost no negative effects.

I enjoy the concept of WFRP's wound system, including stress and fatigue, and critical and serious wounds because it is a lot easier to picture in my mind. You take one or two good hits from a big demon and go down, you are hurt bad in WFRP3, but in D&D 4E it's gonna take 4 or more hits, and that's assuming that nobody fires off one of their numerous auto-heal powers.

In summary, I've found 4E combat to be more about resource management than about actual tactics or roleplaying whereas WFRP3 combat is the opposite.

Superchunk said:

There are healing surges in wfrp3. They just don't call it that. Once per day you can be healed once from different sources of healing.

5 different spells, first aid, splint and bandages, healing draught.

I am just limiting it to 5 heals total and disregarding the source for simplicity.

Gallows said:

Well if you only call it healing surges, you will instantly take away which factor of the healing the players are using. Since in WHFRPG you are running the risks of getting infections or worse if your are doing a healing check with let's say dirty first aid/ rags out in the open fields of battles or dungeons or sewers. Which wikll make the world more real/deadly and hard to heal from sickness and major wounds. That is what i like about this game, it's so much deadlier than D&D4. Battlemaps only encourage metagaming instead of  focusing on the roleplaying part. none of my friends wants to play a D&D4 game anymore because of all the healing surges, powers and most importantly of all the SQUARES calculations. It damned take away all of the imaginations from the game.

Don't mess up with the healing mechanism in this game, it is too great to houserule it any different way. In D&D all you need to fully heal is a days rest. How real is that? " I got scuewered right in the gut yester day, but i'm all fine now thanks to the nights rest, no need to see the doctor so just head back into the ogres nest."

Well I think you are ultimatly going to spend a lot of time as a GM "creating" a tactical mini game for WFRP. Its foundation is to avoid tactical combat so its kind of like trying to run 4th edition without tactical combat.  It can be done, but you have to start really asking the question, "Why are you playing this game if you don't like rules which are its foundation"? 

Any scenario you can imagine can be handled with this system as long as you don't mind abstraction, but if you have problems with abstraction and you see need for a tactical mini game, in particular if you are trying to implement core concepts from 4th edition I have to ask, why not just play 4th edition and use the warhammer universe?  Isnt that a little easier than trying to convert this game to that game?