mattcolville
Adventurer
I was going to add "3rd Edition" but as far as I can tell, the game is just "Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay." Edition isn't mentioned anywhere on the packaging and nowhere in the book that I could find.
It's interesting. We played one session for several hours and didn't finish a combat. The production values are top notch and for that reason alone it deserves attention.
Lots of things never came up. No one went insane, no one suffered from a condition, no one miscast anything. So a substantive percentage of the total bitz in the box never saw use. But, again, only one combat.
It's unfortunate that the funky dice and extensive use of cards for everything make it impossible to try just by downloading a PDF from their website, because I think it would do pretty well if people could try it.
There's three things here. The ideas, the execution, and the presentation.
The ideas seem great. I love the idea of the dice, and what the different facings mean. While I yearn for a system like this with more abstract facings like "politics" and "nature" and "terrain," so I, the GM, am forced to be creative within those random results and explain why Nature caused the thief to fail his lockpick attempt ("a flash of lightning blinded you!"), I found the facings they used worked fine. It wasn't just easy to adjudicate a die roll, it was *fun*.
Something I don't think you can get a sense of without playing: the system is fantastic for pulp action. Cliffhangers. All through the evening the players would succeed (success is typically HIGHLY likely) but with bad side effects. So I got to say "Ok! You successfully leap from the back of the coach to the back of one of the horses! BUT! The horses bolt and pull the coach! Everyone standing on the top of the coach has to make an agility check!" It was always reversal after reversal. Like watching a Saturday Matinée from the 1950s.
The players seemed to get a kick out of that. And my players are very picky when it comes to GM Fiat. Just making stuff up. They like the illusion that the Secondary World is objectively real and I am just describing it to them, rather than inventing it. The minigame of building the dice pool and the choices you make gift the result with enough of an objective feel that when I explain what it means, adjudicating the die roll, the players didn't react like I was just making something up. Well, maybe once I detected some dissatisfaction, but it was one of the first rolls and I don't think we were used to the process yet.
Stances, the Party Sheet, there's just a lot of cool stuff in here. It's well thought-out.
The execution seems middling. The (apparent, haven't studied it closely) overwhelming likelihood of success on any roll seems to undermine the high stakes combat. It's "grim and perilous" except you're probably going to destroy everything without getting seriously hurt. No one suffered a Condition or Miscast or went Insane all night, and no criticals. Again, only one combat. First impression. Too early to judge.
So while I like the idea behind the rules, I think maybe they made it way too easy for the PCs. That should be easily solved, since one of the dice is "Difficulty" and therefore I should just be able to slowly ratchet up the difficulty by adding dice until the players are succeeding only *most* of the time.
The Range and Positioning system struck me as dangerously underthought when I read it, and nothing happened in play to disabuse me of this notion. It's exactly the same as the Range system I designed for Decipher Trek's Starship Combat. I have no reason to think they were aware of this (and wouldn't mind even if they were!) but I bring it up because, having recognized it, I instantly recognized the problems.
The range system is great for simulating combat between two Capital Ships, especially from the point of view of a group of characters in the same room, the Bridge, looking at a viewscreen. Maybe three capital ships.
One of my coworkers said "This would be a nightmare for more than 3 ships," and I said "yeah but I can't think of a solution at the moment and it's Star Trek. Everyting's either 2 or 3 ships, or a huge fleet engagement anyway. It's perfect for Khan v Kirk and that's what people will key off," and indeed I believe I was proved correct.
But man it's a pain for 5 players and three groups of bad guys. At the beginning, when there's this scrum of all the players and one of the bad guys, no problem. But players were continually disengaging and wanted to be *this* far away from *that* guy but only *that* far away from *this* guy, which would have been the work of a moment, no need to even think about it, if it were tactical. But with this abstract system things started to get really messy toward the end of the night.
The solution, I suspect, is; "don't let the players invent their own place to stand." Yes, in a tactical game, you could stand *here* so you're close to this other player but not engaged, you're both at Close Range to the scrum, and you're both at Medium Range from the boss. Yes. But this isn't that game. So we need discreet places (represented by 3X5 cards) and they're fixed on a per-encounter basis. The Coach. The Road. The Forest. The Keep. There. Each has range to the other, and the players decide which card/location to move to. Easy in a Fantasy game, impossible in a space combat game. And appropriate for a game as abstract as this. It would not make *literal* sense ("how come going from the coach to the road always brings me closer to the Boss? He must be standing somewhere. I want to jump off the coach away from him") but I believe it would make narrative sense.
The huge, and to me critical, failing of the game is the presentation. Holy moley is this game hard to figure out.
The first huge oversight we noticed; $100 box, full of bitz, for only 3 players (and 1 GM) and nowhere in all that stuff is there a handful of Character Creation cheatsheets. Character creation isn't that hard, it takes like 5 minutes. But not if you have no idea what you're doing and with no handouts to explain the process and speed it up, it's 5 minutes multiplied by the number of players, since there's only one rulebook to pass around.
This is exacerbated by the way the rules are *written*. It took us about 45 minutes to *guess* what the difference between Career, Advanced, and Basic skills were. In the end, we got pretty close. It was easy for us to build hypotheses about what the designers intended that were entirely consistent with the rules, but contradictory with each other.
No Cheatsheet on how to build a dice pool. That was silly. One sheet with "How to build your dicepool" and "Stress and Fatigue" and "Healing and Recovery" and "reading your action card" would have saved a HUGE amount of trouble.
I mean, you can't *try* the game before you buy it. The funky dice and hundreds of cards (there's a LOT of cards) make that impossible. So it behooves them to make getting into it as easy as possible and here, I feel, they failed.
There's a ridiculous amount of basic stuff that's missing from the rules. Stances, one of the core mechanics that affects every die roll, are explained in several places. None of them tell you how to determine what Stance you're in when you're not in combat. Which seems like it's often, this game seems to think fighting is rare (the adventure bears this out) and dangerous (the dice do not bear this out).
Initiative is a check like any other, but what stance, if any, are you in when you make your Initiative check? No way to find out. What difficulty is an Initiative check? No answer in the rules.
Sometimes it's really maddening. Like the designers are doing it on purpose[/], no hyperbole. One of the core mechanics is Fortune, a resource you spend and which refreshes.
Reading at home, where I read the entire thing like a book, I remembered reading how MUCH fortune you refresh when the time comes. No problem.
At the table, where the book is used as a reference, I could not find it. None of us could find it. There's actually a phrase in the book that reads; "when fortune refreshes, members of the party *may* get *some* of their fortune back," emphasis mine. We know how much, but we won't tell you! Guess and you win a prize! Unacceptable.
If there were an index, maybe I could have found it. There was none. That's ok if you're rules are incredibly well-written. If I can open to the table of contents, find the section on Fortune, and get my answer, I don't need an index.
The monster stats are needlessly compact. Several critical stats are listed only as a parenthetical number after another value. So "Toughness: 4(4)."
That's armor, by the way. That's the listing FOR armor, which is called "soak." Toughness 4(4). Does that clearly communicate "Toughness: 4. Soak: 4" to you?
Sure, once you've looked it up a few times, flipping back to the description of monster stats, you get used to it. But why am I doing that? Why not just WRITE, "Toughness: 4. Soak: 4?" Again, it's like they're doing it on purpose.
That's my initial impression. The FAQ is so short and covers pretty much only the stuff we wondered about it makes me suspect our problems were pretty common. We didn't have the FAQ when we played, because once we reached a point where it was obvious we needed a FAQ, we'd already wasted so much time I just made a call and we moved on.
By the time we stopped, I'd had to make so many calls, looked the same things up over and over, often forgetting whether or not I'd found the answer, because there were so many questions I could now no longer remember which answers we'd learned, my ears were starting to ring and we stopped. We were too mentally fatigued to go on. Not a good way to make a first impression.
This isn't a review, I need to play through several more sessions before I reach any conclusion other than "the rulebook is terribly written." There's a LOT to like in here. But in my experience though, presentation is part of the design.
It's interesting. We played one session for several hours and didn't finish a combat. The production values are top notch and for that reason alone it deserves attention.
Lots of things never came up. No one went insane, no one suffered from a condition, no one miscast anything. So a substantive percentage of the total bitz in the box never saw use. But, again, only one combat.
It's unfortunate that the funky dice and extensive use of cards for everything make it impossible to try just by downloading a PDF from their website, because I think it would do pretty well if people could try it.
There's three things here. The ideas, the execution, and the presentation.
The ideas seem great. I love the idea of the dice, and what the different facings mean. While I yearn for a system like this with more abstract facings like "politics" and "nature" and "terrain," so I, the GM, am forced to be creative within those random results and explain why Nature caused the thief to fail his lockpick attempt ("a flash of lightning blinded you!"), I found the facings they used worked fine. It wasn't just easy to adjudicate a die roll, it was *fun*.
Something I don't think you can get a sense of without playing: the system is fantastic for pulp action. Cliffhangers. All through the evening the players would succeed (success is typically HIGHLY likely) but with bad side effects. So I got to say "Ok! You successfully leap from the back of the coach to the back of one of the horses! BUT! The horses bolt and pull the coach! Everyone standing on the top of the coach has to make an agility check!" It was always reversal after reversal. Like watching a Saturday Matinée from the 1950s.
The players seemed to get a kick out of that. And my players are very picky when it comes to GM Fiat. Just making stuff up. They like the illusion that the Secondary World is objectively real and I am just describing it to them, rather than inventing it. The minigame of building the dice pool and the choices you make gift the result with enough of an objective feel that when I explain what it means, adjudicating the die roll, the players didn't react like I was just making something up. Well, maybe once I detected some dissatisfaction, but it was one of the first rolls and I don't think we were used to the process yet.
Stances, the Party Sheet, there's just a lot of cool stuff in here. It's well thought-out.
The execution seems middling. The (apparent, haven't studied it closely) overwhelming likelihood of success on any roll seems to undermine the high stakes combat. It's "grim and perilous" except you're probably going to destroy everything without getting seriously hurt. No one suffered a Condition or Miscast or went Insane all night, and no criticals. Again, only one combat. First impression. Too early to judge.
So while I like the idea behind the rules, I think maybe they made it way too easy for the PCs. That should be easily solved, since one of the dice is "Difficulty" and therefore I should just be able to slowly ratchet up the difficulty by adding dice until the players are succeeding only *most* of the time.
The Range and Positioning system struck me as dangerously underthought when I read it, and nothing happened in play to disabuse me of this notion. It's exactly the same as the Range system I designed for Decipher Trek's Starship Combat. I have no reason to think they were aware of this (and wouldn't mind even if they were!) but I bring it up because, having recognized it, I instantly recognized the problems.
The range system is great for simulating combat between two Capital Ships, especially from the point of view of a group of characters in the same room, the Bridge, looking at a viewscreen. Maybe three capital ships.
One of my coworkers said "This would be a nightmare for more than 3 ships," and I said "yeah but I can't think of a solution at the moment and it's Star Trek. Everyting's either 2 or 3 ships, or a huge fleet engagement anyway. It's perfect for Khan v Kirk and that's what people will key off," and indeed I believe I was proved correct.
But man it's a pain for 5 players and three groups of bad guys. At the beginning, when there's this scrum of all the players and one of the bad guys, no problem. But players were continually disengaging and wanted to be *this* far away from *that* guy but only *that* far away from *this* guy, which would have been the work of a moment, no need to even think about it, if it were tactical. But with this abstract system things started to get really messy toward the end of the night.
The solution, I suspect, is; "don't let the players invent their own place to stand." Yes, in a tactical game, you could stand *here* so you're close to this other player but not engaged, you're both at Close Range to the scrum, and you're both at Medium Range from the boss. Yes. But this isn't that game. So we need discreet places (represented by 3X5 cards) and they're fixed on a per-encounter basis. The Coach. The Road. The Forest. The Keep. There. Each has range to the other, and the players decide which card/location to move to. Easy in a Fantasy game, impossible in a space combat game. And appropriate for a game as abstract as this. It would not make *literal* sense ("how come going from the coach to the road always brings me closer to the Boss? He must be standing somewhere. I want to jump off the coach away from him") but I believe it would make narrative sense.
The huge, and to me critical, failing of the game is the presentation. Holy moley is this game hard to figure out.
The first huge oversight we noticed; $100 box, full of bitz, for only 3 players (and 1 GM) and nowhere in all that stuff is there a handful of Character Creation cheatsheets. Character creation isn't that hard, it takes like 5 minutes. But not if you have no idea what you're doing and with no handouts to explain the process and speed it up, it's 5 minutes multiplied by the number of players, since there's only one rulebook to pass around.
This is exacerbated by the way the rules are *written*. It took us about 45 minutes to *guess* what the difference between Career, Advanced, and Basic skills were. In the end, we got pretty close. It was easy for us to build hypotheses about what the designers intended that were entirely consistent with the rules, but contradictory with each other.
No Cheatsheet on how to build a dice pool. That was silly. One sheet with "How to build your dicepool" and "Stress and Fatigue" and "Healing and Recovery" and "reading your action card" would have saved a HUGE amount of trouble.
I mean, you can't *try* the game before you buy it. The funky dice and hundreds of cards (there's a LOT of cards) make that impossible. So it behooves them to make getting into it as easy as possible and here, I feel, they failed.
There's a ridiculous amount of basic stuff that's missing from the rules. Stances, one of the core mechanics that affects every die roll, are explained in several places. None of them tell you how to determine what Stance you're in when you're not in combat. Which seems like it's often, this game seems to think fighting is rare (the adventure bears this out) and dangerous (the dice do not bear this out).
Initiative is a check like any other, but what stance, if any, are you in when you make your Initiative check? No way to find out. What difficulty is an Initiative check? No answer in the rules.
Sometimes it's really maddening. Like the designers are doing it on purpose[/], no hyperbole. One of the core mechanics is Fortune, a resource you spend and which refreshes.
Reading at home, where I read the entire thing like a book, I remembered reading how MUCH fortune you refresh when the time comes. No problem.
At the table, where the book is used as a reference, I could not find it. None of us could find it. There's actually a phrase in the book that reads; "when fortune refreshes, members of the party *may* get *some* of their fortune back," emphasis mine. We know how much, but we won't tell you! Guess and you win a prize! Unacceptable.
If there were an index, maybe I could have found it. There was none. That's ok if you're rules are incredibly well-written. If I can open to the table of contents, find the section on Fortune, and get my answer, I don't need an index.
The monster stats are needlessly compact. Several critical stats are listed only as a parenthetical number after another value. So "Toughness: 4(4)."
That's armor, by the way. That's the listing FOR armor, which is called "soak." Toughness 4(4). Does that clearly communicate "Toughness: 4. Soak: 4" to you?
Sure, once you've looked it up a few times, flipping back to the description of monster stats, you get used to it. But why am I doing that? Why not just WRITE, "Toughness: 4. Soak: 4?" Again, it's like they're doing it on purpose.
That's my initial impression. The FAQ is so short and covers pretty much only the stuff we wondered about it makes me suspect our problems were pretty common. We didn't have the FAQ when we played, because once we reached a point where it was obvious we needed a FAQ, we'd already wasted so much time I just made a call and we moved on.
By the time we stopped, I'd had to make so many calls, looked the same things up over and over, often forgetting whether or not I'd found the answer, because there were so many questions I could now no longer remember which answers we'd learned, my ears were starting to ring and we stopped. We were too mentally fatigued to go on. Not a good way to make a first impression.
This isn't a review, I need to play through several more sessions before I reach any conclusion other than "the rulebook is terribly written." There's a LOT to like in here. But in my experience though, presentation is part of the design.
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