WFRP careers in 4E

[JoeNotCharles]

I love WFRP's career system, but last time I tried to play it I found combat devolving into "I attack / you attack" - this is why I picked up 4E, I find I need its structure to keep fights interesting. (I understand lots of people don't need that, it's a mental block of mine I guess.)

So I'd love to play WFRP with pseudo-4E rules. I think the best way to do this is to play 4E, but with the classes replaced by WFRP-style careers.

The best way I can think to do this is to divide them more rigidly into ranks - Basic careers would all cover level 1-5, the first set of Advanced careers would cover 6-10, and then later careers (things like Wizard Lord that need to finish an Advanced Career to enter) would be 11-15. There's no need to go all the way up to 30 in this setting.

Each career would be a class with a short list of powers, and once you reach the highest level it covers you'd need to choose a new career for your next level.

The problem with this is your first career becomes important because it determines your at-wills, while in WFRP it's the career you were stuck with by fate before you became an adventurer, so really it should be the LEAST important. One fix would be to make sure each career has 1st-level at-wills as well as its level-appropriate powers so you can retrain them as you move through careers.

The other problem is that the fun of WFRP's system is that it's fluid - you can spend some time bouncing around basic careers, or move into an advanced career and then back to basic (in order to open up new career exits, for instance). If you just divided careers up into mini-classes by level, there would be no way to move sideways or backwards.

Any thoughts on how to handle this?