Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

[Tempest]

Warhammer fantasy roleplay, made by Black industries, is going out of print by fall 2008. Get your copies now if you want em. Believe me its worth the money, every last cent.

[TigerStripedDog]

Okay, so before I go Ebay nuts, talk to me about what the game is like. What sort of system is used as far as dice are concerned? I know the basics of the warhammer universe, but I don't really know what races this game offers. What kind of system do they have for skills and whatnot?

Tiger

[Tempest]

I'll type up a couple of important things real quick, and expand upon it tomorrow.

Races: Elves, Dwarfs, Humans, Halflings. There are some fan based and BI (Black Industries) approved ones that can be found on the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay official site. Just google it, its pretty amazing.

Important Mechanics:

The system is a percentile based system. Your characters stats are percent chance of sucsess. If I have a 40 for a certain trait, then to succede when using that trait I must role under forty on a d100 roll.

There are around 10-15 traits, I forget how many, but these traits basically govern everything you can do. Weapons skill, Balistics skill, inteligence, Fellowship (charisma) etc are some examples.

There are two types of traits Primary and secondary. Secondary traits are derived from primary ones and some also stand on their own.

There are two traits of special interest, Fate points, and Insanity points. Fate points work basicly like redos or extra lives. (Or if you've played star wars force points) Characters are fairly fragil in WFRP especially in early careers so Fate points were introduced to help players out with fickle dice. Insanity points are gained as a result of a harrowing sanity blasting experience. These are somewhat like darkside points in star wars and different game masters call very different things sanity blasting. Just know that the more you get the more derangements you get. Eventually most characters go mad though there are some mechanics to help prevent such things. Its a grim world however very dark in tone. Long lived characters tend to be a little unstable or outright insane thanks to all the fun things they have seen.

The equivalents of class in WFRP are careers. There are lots of different careers (40-60) including things like peasant, woodsman, hunter, apprentice wizard, tradesman, knight, Troll slayer, entertainer etc. Each career has its own skill set, and talent set. There are careers for every type of rp group imaginable. This career system is one of the greatest things about WFRP.

Each career (as I mentioned above) has its own set of skills. Skills come in two forms basic and advanced. Basic skills can be attempted by anyone, advanced skills can only be attempted by people who have training. Skills depend on their one of the primary characteristics mentioned before for success. More skill training improves your chances above the normal characteriistic.

Talents function similarly to feats in dnd 3e but they are less silly. Talents do all sorts of nifty things I won't get into right now.

THe standard method to creat characts is to roll randomly for stats and starting career. Except for the choice of race a good amount of the characters initial background is chosen by the dice. Thus I may start out and say, I want to be a human. After the dice are rolled I find out that my starting career is peasant, meaning that before I became an adventurer I was a peasant. Now i have decided to give up that life for a new one. The random starting career is actually really fun since the career system is fairly flexable and if you don't like your starting career you can branch out into a new one quick enough. I usually allow the players to roll up four starting career choices instead of just the one.

The game is designed in such a way that money and equipment are scarce. The mood of the game is such that sometimes the character may have to worry about where their next meal might come from. It is nothing like dnd in terms of magic items, since a very powerful party (equivalent to level 20s) might only have 2 or 3 magic items.

I apologize for the wandering tendancies of this post. Its three in the morning and time for me to go to bed. I'll try to put up some more important info tomorrow.

[TigerStripedDog]

It sounds very interesting. I have used some of these ideas in my Arborris campaign. There the last true mage lived around 50,000 years ago. And my 7th level party has 2 magical items, one of which they have no idea how to use. The other is a weapon that they don't know is magical. Interesting to say the least.

I like the madness angle. Ads for another dimension to the game. I do worry about percentile based systems though, as I have always predicted them to be somewhat cumbersome. I could be very wrong however and I would be willing to admit that I have never tried it, and as such shouldn't knock it.


Tiger

[Tempest]

Its actually very light. Character creation only takes fifteen minutes or so and all rolls you roll a pair of d 10s and compair to your stat line. Its simple and easy to learn. The only rules that are a bit cumbersome are the combat rules, some of which (the troublsome ones) can be ignored.

The best part of the game to be honest is the setting which is very well supported. Most of the suppliments contain little in the way of rules, they contain mostly information in the campaign setting. The web site has tons of extra material, senarios and what not. Its great.

Another comment. In warhammer the difficulty of a task is represented by penalties or bonuses to the stat line so if something is really easy you get a 30% increased chance to succede or if something is hard you might take a 5-10% penalty to your stat.

[TigerStripedDog]

What about conversion of the game to a D&D 2E system. Lets say I purchase the game, but can't sell any of my players on buying it themselves or converting over. Could I take the campaign setting that I have in my new rulebook, and apply it to a different system? Could the mythos and background work within a D&D setting?


Tiger

[Tempest]

You could use your campaign setting with this set of rules. Another important point of information. Wizards and Clerics as it were are alot different under WFRP rules. Spells can be cast whenever the caster so desires but there is always some risk associated with casting a spell. For each point in the characters magic characteristic the character has they are allowed to roll a d10 towards achieving a numerical difficulty asscribed to one of their spells. The more dice you roll the more the risk. Doubles result in a minor chaos manifestation, such as milk nearby stagnates or your eyes glow. These are not always dangerous but there can be rp ramifications. Triples result in a major chaos manifestation. You might take some damage or summon a daemon from the warp. Catasrophic chaos manifestations result from quadruples of the same number and are really bad. Maybe you get sucked into the warp never to be seen again. Maybe you summon a really, really, bad daemon. A funny one is that a certain effect happens to your nearest relative so one day your old man who last saw you as a boy before you were wisked off to the colleges of magic gets sucked straight into hell where he is tormented for the rest of eternity. It can be a real drag. It really makes using magic fun, especially since you make sure that you really need to be using magic, no flippant casting, especially of higher level spells.

Can the mythos be imported into dnd, yes with some work but the magic thing I mentioned above would be hard to simulate and the same would be true if you took your campaign world and stamped it on the WFRP rules. Other then magic most things could swing both ways with some work. A vast part of the WFRP line is just mythos, just material background on the world, which I think is cool.

If when we speak of conversions, you wish to speak in terms of translating rules, that would be a bear to say the least.