Warhammer Fantasy RPG (3rd Edition) First Impressions
I ran sessions of Fantasy Flight's new version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at the Compleat Strategist last weekend, using the included scenario. Unlike a lot of people who will be interested in the game, I don't have much Warhammer Fantasy background and don't have many preconceptions of the prior game system or setting. My RPG experience is pretty extensive, mostly as a player of various independent and non-TSR/White Wolf games, mostly as a GM for D&D, Changeling, GURPS and a few others. The three word sum of my first impressions: It's pretty good.
If you've played Fantasy Flight games before, you have a pretty good idea of the component quality. The cards and counters are similar to Arkam Horror or Descent. There aren't miniatures like Descent, but there are counters and stands (like their Battlestar board game) to represent monsters or characters. There's about 30 game-specific dice - not standard d8s, d10s or d6s - which are integrated into the game mechanic.
More on the dice, as there are so many of them and they come into play for many skill challenges. The mechanic for resolving whether something gets done is to collect a pool of dice and to roll them. If the number of axes (successes) beats the number of crossed swords (failures), it's a success.
Say I want to swing a sword at a goat-headed beastman. As a Dwarven Trollhunter, my strength is 5. That's five blue dice. I am two deep into an aggressive stance. Two of those blue dice convert to the aggressive red dice. (The green dice, for being in conservative stance, work similarly. Both the red and green dice can roll better than the blue dice. However, the red die has greater number of success and failures on the sides as well as the possibility of fatigue. The green die has fewer successes and the possibility of delay.) I have one check mark next to the weapon skill skill. I get 1 yellow die (the best die in the game, with a chance for a "Sigmar's Comet", the opposite of the Chaos mark). The beastman has a thick, leathery hide, which counts as defense one. I get one black misfortune die as a result. And, finally, swinging a sword at the guy counts as an Easy level task, so that is one purple challenge die. If I so desire, before I roll, I can spend as many fortune points as I'd like to get a white fortune die for each point spent into the pool. Fortune and misfortune dice can be given at GM discretion; basically when you'd give or take a +/- 2 in D&D (3.0 or 3.5).
So, you roll the handful of dice and start counting things up. Crossed swords and axes cancel for the overall success. Eagles and skulls cancel for boon/bane effect. The double-tailed comet and the chaos symbol could both be present, and both resolve. And, more rarely, the hourglass (delay), droplet of blood (fatigue/stress) or righteous success (axe with a plus sign next to it, which lets you add an extra die of that type) could be put into things. And a lot of faces are blank, which don't do anything.
And to get more complicated than that, I probably used a card of some kind to swing that axe - and that card tells me what these dice rolls can (or in the case of negative effects, must) be spent on. Altogether, this adds up to a system that answers not whether you succeed and how well, but in what manner that happens - look at which colored dice rolled what, and you know why a success occurred (or didn't).
In combat, distances are notional rather than specific. Extreme, long, medium, short and whether you're "engaged" to use melee or other effects or not.
While initiative is rolled based off the speed of each party member (and for each group of monsters equal in size to the party - a group of 6 average mobs would roll 2 initiative per 3 groups), the order the characters actually play is decided by the party as a group. If I rolled 4 successes on my initiative and Joe rolled 1, Joe can go on 4 when the combat goes and I could go on 1.
The players may choose a party sheet, which gives the group a special ability and allows individual character abilities to be used by the party. Also, if they can't decide on initiative, if there's interparty conflict, or other effects - like failed spellcasting - there's a marker that tracks it and creates penalties at certain times. Certain classes have abilities that reduce this tension.
Randomness plays a big part in the base mechanics of the game. Character classes are generated randomly. Race can even be generated randomly. Stats, however, are not - they are based off of the class and race that you draw, and what your experience points are spent on.
While I hadn't played it extensively, these parts - the basic mechanics - feels pretty satisfactory. Time will tell whether it'll hold up.
Some bits that worry me a little. The first is the price. It's a $100 game for three players and a GM. How necessarily three player is it? Well, three sets of the basic action cards (approximately 12) are given in the game. Since the action cards sometimes have specific dice-related information on them, until familiarity is reached, it could mean some sharing. (There aren't supposed to be people with the same classes in the same party, so there is only one set of cards for each class.) A $35 expansion set that lets you add a player or so is already going to be released with the base set. The dice border very close to being a collectible dice game, the cards and bits are pretty unique to their classes. While other game systems have offered these things as supplements (looking again at D&D and a little bit at White Wolf), none have made them as central and necessary as this one. Players will need to rely on Fantasy Flight not to abuse this too much. There's a cost/value choice to make, and I think to their credit, Fantasy Flight has yet to abuse this much; if you've played Fantasy Flight Games, you probably know this. Warhammer Fantasy is four, four-color, soft-cover rolebooks and amazingly large number of cards with rules on them (locations, classes, party sheets, actions, skills, spells, insanity, etc.) a large number of counters (stance tracking, fatigue, stress, etc.) and generally high production values.
Unlike a lot of RPGs based on other fiction, there's not that much background material in the game itself; perhaps 20-25 pages or so. Enough to get a feel for the province in the Empire you operate in, and a rough guide to the main races, neighbors and current situation.
Based off of comments from players in the test game who have played the prior edition, other things that might interest you are that the power level in 3rd edition starts higher than 2nd edition. You can start with firearms and some magic, which from my understanding was not something that could be touched in the prior edition. You graduate from one career to another. Boatman is still included as a starting class.
There's an insanity system, too, but I didn't have a chance to use it. It looks pretty interesting - call it a touch of Cthuhlu thrown into this game too.
Ultimately, the players had fun, and it was pretty easy to learn and run.
posted by Gaylord500 at
9:21 PM
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Crisp air, a cool breeze, chirping birds and still country air. This idyllic setting is not some painting or from a movie. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Within the halls of the Eisenhower Convention Center in Gettyburg, PA the sounds of gunfire, ancient warriors locking in combat, jets and the cries of missed die rolls can be heard. 
