Ten things that I cannot stand about WFRP

jericho wrote:
And remember, PCs are adventurers, not part of an active career. Careers represent an occupation you have in your normal life, between adventures.

That really depends on individual groups and campaigns. A campaign could easily focus on a party of priests and scholars with their bodyguards conducting an inspection tour of their cults monasteries - not an adventure as RPGs define the term, just people doing their jobs and encountering unusual circumstances. Similarly, you could easily have a campaign focused on trading missions, in which the characters are merchants, wagon drivers and so on - again, people doing their jobs, but have interesting experiences along the way. Or nobles, courtiers, spies and court guards involved in some intrigue at the Imperial Palace. Or the captain, his crew and his passengers on route to Lustria.

I prefer to think of characters in WFRP as people who have adventures within their careers. Career change or Advance/Skill/Talent acquisition then become dependent on story and circumstances (and stressful situations drive change faster than comfortable ones), rather than a player's desire for higher scores and extra powers.

Cheers

Sparrow

Moracai wrote:15th Full plates are too awsum. If I would have any part in designing the game, I would have capped the max AP to 4, instead of 6.

I have removed this artificial cap in my games. Logically there can be no AP cap, you can allways have better and or thicker armour.

Lord of the Pit wrote:I have removed this artificial cap in my games. Logically there can be no AP cap, you can allways have better and or thicker armour.

If it was as simple as that we'd have never stopped using the stuff.

There are issues of practicality and common sense here. I mean, you could sit in a tank and stick your head out the top and say you're wearing armour, but patrolling the battlements becomes a logistical nightmare.

Cheers

Sparrow

James Sparrow wrote:

Lord of the Pit wrote:I have removed this artificial cap in my games. Logically there can be no AP cap, you can allways have better and or thicker armour.

If it was as simple as that we'd have never stopped using the stuff.

There are issues of practicality and common sense here. I mean, you could sit in a tank and stick your head out the top and say you're wearing armour, but patrolling the battlements becomes a logistical nightmare.

Cheers

Sparrow

If a character wants to have 2cm thick armour, and somehow manages to have it made, I let him. He wont move around a lot though...

What I mean is that an artificial cap is not the way to go, and serves no purpose. The rules say that there is a 5 ap maximum, and then introduces an exception namely Gromril. The next time the designers come up with something more powerful, a new exception is introduced. Given that, why have the cap in the first place?

The same can be said about the stat cap. Something can allways be bigger and tougher...

James Sparrow wrote:

jericho wrote:

I prefer to think of characters in WFRP as people who have adventures within their careers. Career change or Advance/Skill/Talent acquisition then become dependent on story and circumstances (and stressful situations drive change faster than comfortable ones), rather than a player's desire for higher scores and extra powers.

Cheers

Sparrow

Of course, but the limited timespan of most adventures limits the acquisition os Skills and Talents, unless you throw verisimilitude out the window. The idea here is that "adventures" make you an "adventurer" in the sense that your daily life is no longer the typical fare of others in your career. Playing Soldiers going to war could be played out as is, but that would be the exception, not the norm.

Typical groups have a funny mix of careers doing rather out-of-the-norm stuff.

Lord of the Pit wrote:The same can be said about the stat cap. Something can allways be bigger and tougher...

Well, there is no stat cap, now is there...

In fact the example of Daemon Weapons in ToC has stats over a hundred in it.

The only thing I have a rub against that is that according to rules as written, the Strenght and Toughness stats that are above 100 have a Bonus of 1!!! (the first digit of S/T)

About your AP approach.

No offence, but I'm kind of glad that I'm not a player in your game. I wouldn't wan't to take part in such arms race, but to each his own and if it works for your group, fine.

Dammit. Now you have made me curious. Please tell what kind of party you are currently running, and what kind of parties you have ran with the second edition? Many wizards? Thieves? What type of warriors? etc...

Following that line of thought. I have forgotten whether you have ran WFRP 1st ed or not. If you have, how did you handle AP in that?

Lord of the Pit wrote:What I mean is that an artificial cap is not the way to go, and serves no purpose.

Well, I find that capping armour is an excellent decision, and serves the worthy purpose of making it clear to players what they can expect from armour. Note that the designers took the very wise path of having magical armour replace rather than complement physical armour. This puts a very effective dampener on minmaxing - it isn't worthwhile to combine different items and it isn't worthwhile to search the world for exotic materials or new bestest rituals.

In essence, 5 AP is the practical maximum limit. Sure, you can introduce 8 AP armour, but you'd have to make the suit steam-driven or something, which makes me "forgive" the core rulebook for not taking this into account.

As they say, when you're professional, you can break the rules. And indeed Gomril does exactly this.

But that shouldn't be seen as making the rule pointless. In fact, it's the opposite.

Thanks to this rule, Gomril becomes all the more exotic and valuable, while still sending a message to players that they shouldn't expect very many other exeptions (if any at all, like IMC)

IMO this is a fine example of good, exception-based, rules design!

Lord of the Pit wrote:The same can be said about the stat cap. Something can allways be bigger and tougher...

My understanding is that this isn't true. Unlike Rolemaster or D&D, there simply isn't a never-ending list of increasingly über materials like adamantium armour, eog armour etc etc. Gomril is the exception, not an exception.

If I'm not mistaken this holds true for the official supplements*, which really is all that counts, in that if you introduce more exceptions in your game, you can't really blame the core game for keeping to the rule, can you?

*) Possibly excepting Old World Armoury. If you say it adds some other wonder armour, I wouldn't be surprised. After all, there's a reason I'm not putting that book into the hands of my players...

About the stat cap, I seem to remember that one of the BI'ers (methinks Dave A) once said that in their in-house games they cap stats at 95*. That is, no matter how high your stat is, the bonus is never higher than +9 and rolling 96-00 is always a miss. At least this way, the phrasing of the stat bonuses doesn't become a problem...

*) Could have been 99 too, can't really remember...

Uh, upon reading my reply I should probably clarify:

By "that's not true" above I refer to "the same can be said". That is, while stats probably should be allowed to exceed 100, APs should probably remain capped at 5.

Thanks,
Z

CapnZapp wrote:*) Possibly excepting Old World Armoury. If you say it adds some other wonder armour, I wouldn't be surprised. After all, there's a reason I'm not putting that book into the hands of my players...

Hear, hear!

Armour in 1st Ed was simple. It gave 1 point of protection.

Leather Armour gave 1 point as long as the attack did less then 4 damage.

Shields gave 1 point of armour to all locations. They weren't a weapon.

If you succeeded at a parry you rolled damage and reduced that attack by that much.

...And you ccould wear another layer of armour (plate) to get a total of 2 AP (3 including shield). Which rendered leather armour almost useless, apart from cosmetic influence on PC image (Conan-style furry underwear, for example). And rules for shields and parrying were absolutely crap. Reality-wise and game-wise.

The shield rule was a simple rule that in hindsight probably was too simple. But I can't say it was crap.

OTOH, the parry rule was too complex. Simplifying this to today's parry where the parry negates just enough damage to avoid any damage is very reasonable while changing very little in practice. (The original rule was intended to not make parries unrealistically powerful against dragon and giant attacks, but all it did was to unbalancingly make dodges better than parries. Much better then to say that some parries are deflections rather than blocks, and suddenly this "realism" issue pretty much goes away. And you have Unstoppable Blows as well.).

Re: v1 armour. What makes you say Leather armour was useless? It's pretty common to fight a weak opponent that often deals you few points of damage at a time. If anything, I would have thought you to consider v2 leather armour useless - after all, it only gives one fifth the protection of leather+chain+plate.

CapnZapp wrote:Re: v1 armour. What makes you say Leather armour was useless? It's pretty common to fight a weak opponent that often deals you few points of damage at a time.

It has to be pretty weak to not do 4 damage, a strength 3 hit cannot fail to ignore it.

How come I remember that in V1 leather armour worked thusly:

- Attacker rolls 1-3 on damage die: 1 point is reducted by the armour.

- Attacker rolls 4-6 on damage die: 0 points is reducted by the armour.

Could have been a houserule though...

Moracai wrote:

Lord of the Pit wrote:The same can be said about the stat cap. Something can allways be bigger and tougher...

Well, there is no stat cap, now is there...

In fact the example of Daemon Weapons in ToC has stats over a hundred in it.

The only thing I have a rub against that is that according to rules as written, the Strenght and Toughness stats that are above 100 have a Bonus of 1!!! (the first digit of S/T)

About your AP approach.

No offence, but I'm kind of glad that I'm not a player in your game. I wouldn't wan't to take part in such arms race, but to each his own and if it works for your group, fine.

Dammit. Now you have made me curious. Please tell what kind of party you are currently running, and what kind of parties you have ran with the second edition? Many wizards? Thieves? What type of warriors? etc...

Following that line of thought. I have forgotten whether you have ran WFRP 1st ed or not. If you have, how did you handle AP in that?

I run 2nd edition.

We have in our group:

-A Merchant. Adolfus Goldmann. He more or less employs the other players. Hes not your typical friendly boss. Hands down the most greedy character/player ever.
-A servant, trying to embezzle from his employer. So far low quality food is what hes been able to get his hands on... (and some sausages from Fear the Worst....hehe).
-A Mercenary. Dolph. An Ulrican with some problems with staying on the narrow path. This is the only player with any real armour (has more or less full chain IIRC)
-An elven Wizard apprentice, Sethra (yeah, I know..). She is constantly abusing magic power (I allow players to use more powerdice at great risk), and will probably end up on the stake sooner or later.
-A Coachman, Heinz, with a serious drinking problem. Hes the only one able to drive the wagon, when hes more or less sober. He usually uses his blunderbus, so he at least has a chance of hitting something.

About arms races, there is none.

I have GMd for so long that I have no trouble reigning in any players wet armour dreams. To be fair, even without a cap, you will have a very hard time going over 5 APs anyway. Its Gromril, Full Plate (Dwarven made, a la WFB), Magic/Rune armour or Chaos Armour you need to do it. But if a player for some reason manages to get their hands on a Gromril Rune armour (have you heard about hell frezing over lately...) I would let him have his 7 APs. Of course, half the Old World would be coming after him to steal it....

Regarding Stat Cap. Daemon weapons aside, there is a cap. There have been endless discussion about this on the old forums though (hey, my character is stronger than a 10 foot tall Ogre!)

Moracai wrote:Could have been a houserule though...

Yes, a very common House rule as that actually makes sense unlike the books version. (Which I just double checked)

Moracai wrote:How come I remember that in V1 leather armour worked thusly:

- Attacker rolls 1-3 on damage die: 1 point is reducted by the armour.

- Attacker rolls 4-6 on damage die: 0 points is reducted by the armour.

Could have been a houserule though...

No, it was points of damage.

Lord of the Pit wrote:
No, it was the RAW.

No it wasn't.

Lord of the Pit wrote:Lots of text snipped.

Regarding Stat Cap. Daemon weapons aside, there is a cap. There have been endless discussion about this on the old forums though (hey, my character is stronger than a 10 foot tall Ogre!)

OK, so your style of GMing is the main reason your no AP cap appoach has been worked so far.

About the stat cap then. Can you actually name me a book and a page number for reference, 'cause I must have missed it?

Lord of the Pit wrote:
I have GMd for so long that I have no trouble reigning in any players wet armour dreams. To be fair, even without a cap, you will have a very hard time going over 5 APs anyway. Its Gromril, Full Plate (Dwarven made, a la WFB), Magic/Rune armour or Chaos Armour you need to do it. But if a player for some reason manages to get their hands on a Gromril Rune armour (have you heard about hell frezing over lately...) I would let him have his 7 APs. Of course, half the Old World would be coming after him to steal it....

Gromril Rune Armour gives 7 AP by by the RAW anyway!

Moracai wrote:

Lord of the Pit wrote:Lots of text snipped.

Regarding Stat Cap. Daemon weapons aside, there is a cap. There have been endless discussion about this on the old forums though (hey, my character is stronger than a 10 foot tall Ogre!)

OK, so your style of GMing is the main reason your no AP cap appoach has been worked so far.

About the stat cap then. Can you actually name me a book and a page number for reference, 'cause I must have missed it?

Come on! If Dragons and Greater Daemons have below 100 theres a cap, if not explicit.

Lord of the Pit wrote:Come on! If Dragons and Greater Daemons have below 100 theres a cap, if not explicit.

Unfortunately Dave A didn't wan't to take more firm stand in the topic than this.

http://forum.blackindustries.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9037

jadrax wrote:

Lord of the Pit wrote:
I have GMd for so long that I have no trouble reigning in any players wet armour dreams. To be fair, even without a cap, you will have a very hard time going over 5 APs anyway. Its Gromril, Full Plate (Dwarven made, a la WFB), Magic/Rune armour or Chaos Armour you need to do it. But if a player for some reason manages to get their hands on a Gromril Rune armour (have you heard about hell frezing over lately...) I would let him have his 7 APs. Of course, half the Old World would be coming after him to steal it....

Gromril Rune Armour gives 7 AP by by the RAW anyway!

Hehe, I had a nagging feeling, but didnt have the rulebook with me.

The a 5AP cap is even more weird. First you have the gromril exception with AP6, and this one more for AP7.

So, basically they say its a cap, but really there isnt.

V1 did implement this very well with TEW.
I never even thought of trappings the way people on this forum consider them, that is, monetary hurdles to move into the career. A kind of hidden gp-xp relationship, in a way...

The career says you need a pistol or a firearm ? In many cases, your career will give it to you ! (Soldier, Coachman...) So getting the pistol isn't a problem. The idea behind trappings, IMO, is to give a good idea on what tools members of this career need to do their job. Ditto.

And remember, PCs are adventurers, not part of an active career. Careers represent an occupation you have in your normal life, between adventures. For verisimilitude, GMs should always prepare some downtime between adventures where PCs go back to being normal citizens and occupy their present career. That makes buying skills and talents believable.

I only allow some advance scheme advances to be bought during adventures. All skills must be bought between adventures.

You and I are totally on the same page. When the XP/Career system was being debated on the old forums, I always said that you don't learn a new language by whacking a few snotlings on the head. In other words, XP isn't just the result of adventuring, but also the things you do in your career outside the adventures as well.

So if a scribe earns 200xp during an adventure, he might have earned some of it during the adventure (translating an ancient text, identifying some artefact, or just investigating in general) but you can also imagine that some of it was earned during the time between adventures when he was studying history books in his downtime, or acting as an accountant for some noble. And that's where you might learn a new language, as the noble in question might be a Brettonian visiting the Empire or something similar.

If it didn't work this way, I argue, then there would be no Stewards or other advanced academic/political characters in the Warhammer World unless the whole population went on 'adventures,' something we know is very unlikely as adventuring is considered to be a stupid, possibly insane, way to go about life by the general population, which is reflected in a general distrust that the locals typically have for adventuring types.

I prefer to think of characters in WFRP as people who have adventures within their careers. Career change or Advance/Skill/Talent acquisition then become dependent on story and circumstances (and stressful situations drive change faster than comfortable ones), rather than a player's desire for higher scores and extra powers.

If the character careers happen to lend themselves to that, I'll do that as well. So a party made up of an Initiate of Sigmar, Ratcatcher, Apprentice Wizard and Roadwarden would be easy to accomadate. However, despite the desire for such a group to find trouble, you also have to consider the fact that there won't necessarily be 'adventure' grade situations popping up daily. Sure, you could say that 'encounter' grade material can be pretty easy to find (an ambush by bandits, a pickpocket, a bar brawl, etc.) but the big important adventures should be a little more rare, leaving the party with some downtime to pickup other skills (like languages, swimming, etc.).

Me personally, unless there is a strong reason for one adventure to follow the other, I typically give D6 months of downtime between major adventures, or maybe just a month between little one-offs. This gives people a chance to travel about and do their jobs or learn 'non-adventuring' skills. This also ages them nicely so I don't end up with any 19 year old Mage Lords running around the place.

TEW is a good example, again. Although the adventures all occur one after the other, there is plenty of downtime reflected in them. The DotR adventure, for instance, provides them with a boat and rules for trading so they can spend some time sailing up and down the river doing a bit of merchant work.

You'd never play that out (none of my players would get too excited about playing Barges & Bargains), but you can make a few rolls to get the results, let them pick up some new skills like Swim, Bargain or Languages, and chalk up 'x' amount of time before moving on to the next bit of the adventure (usually by sinking their boat and stranding them where you want them to be)...

jadrax wrote:

CapnZapp wrote:Re: v1 armour. What makes you say Leather armour was useless? It's pretty common to fight a weak opponent that often deals you few points of damage at a time.

It has to be pretty weak to not do 4 damage, a strength 3 hit cannot fail to ignore it.

Sorry, I'm not following you here?