Help me help my group like WFRP

[Dargon]

To adventure in the Warhammer world

A few get rich.
Some earn respect.
Some earn prestige.
A fair among of them become corrupted .
A lot gets their mind trashed.
Almost everyone dies.
And in the end no one gets what he or she wants.


Great system to use when you need a break from DND.
It is said before but no matter what you face it can kill you (in dnd terms: a goblin could, with a bit of luck, kill off a frenzy berserker).

 

[frankthedm]

One guy in my group would hate the setting because dwarves (and Imperial soldiers to a lesser extent) can have black powder firearms. Another wouldn't like it, because he'd feel that his ability to coast through the game doing cool things without being smacked down would be limited.

:\ I have those two in my group as well.

 

[EvilDwarf]

EN Worlders come through again--this is some great stuff. Creative replies with insightful advice; what more could someone ask for?

Thanks, everyone!

 

[Stone Dog]

"Warhammer is the game where players start out thinking they are playing D&D but gradually learn they are playing Call of Cthulu."

 

[Gort]

I've had a lot of fun with WFRP just running the book adventures from Plundered Vaults and Ashes of Middenheim. WFRP is a great game to have on-hand if someone else is DMing something and doesn't have time to write an adventure, or if you're going to play a short campaign or adventure. Making a character has exactly two choices involved (race and then a choice between two randomly-generated careers) and is very fast and fun.

Combats are lethal at the beginning of the game where most players are in leather with small amounts of mail, but get less-so once plate comes into play, although any hit can be lethal - hits do D10+strength (average human is 3) but 10s explode, infinitely. Bows and other ranged weapons are particularly lethal - as someone else said, when someone attacks you with a sword you can either parry or dodge it. If someone attacks you with a bow, you can't do either of these things, so good archers are very nasty and you don't want to be shot at too often.

Magic has a lot of flavour, and carries a fair bit of risk. Powerful wizards will often not use their most powerful magic, since the more power you use the more likely you are to suffer some backlash.

Insanity is an ever-present risk. Whenever you suffer a critical hit, you have a good chance to gain an insanity point. When you get six of these, you are at risk of gaining a mental condition. My players have been pyromaniacs, have suffered from terrible nightmares, in one case have been turned into a chaos spawn over time. Insanity surgery can be hilarious as well, one of my characters has had the top of his head sawn off about three times now.

So, it's a great setting, and the rules really compliment it. Just make sure your players realise that it's a very dark world and horrible things are likely to happen to their characters, but that's all part of the fun. Have them make a group of insane dwarf trollslayers and have at it

 

[mhensley]

Mike's Top Ten Reasons to Play WHFRP instead of D&D

10. You only need 2 d10's to play.
9. You only need 1 book to play.
8. Although you only need the one book, you'll want to get them all as they are great reads unlike the the dry, textbook-like D&D books.
7. No alignments, unless you count crazy as an alignment. See below.
6. Insanity - so fun they made it a stat.
5. Despite rumors to the contrary, it's much harder for a starting pc to die in WFRP than in D&D.
4. Crits that lop off limbs are much more entertaining than ones that do 3X damage.
3. Magic is powerful and dangerous to everyone, including the user.
2. It doesn't take itself too seriously. There's lots of humor to be found in all of the products.
1. You can play a dead-hard Dwarf Trollslayer that drinks vodka by the bucket and has nails embedded in his skull as a fashion accessory.

YMMV

 

[Ulrick]

As I've said before...

D&D is like the rock'n roll music you hear on the radio in the United States. Almost everybody listens to it and likes it.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is Rammstein.

 

[scourger]

I ran WFRP for about 12 weekly sessions late last year. I used the module Karak Azgal (currently in print). The idea of a dwarfen city atop a dwarfen ruin was intruguing to me. It was inspired that the dwarfs bascially charge for admission to explore the ruins and insist on taxing any profits in addition to taking any true artifacts. The only other books I kept are the core book and the Old World Bestiary--mainly because it has neat information for the heroes from stories they may have heard about a particular critter. I also had the character pack so there would be plenty of character sheets. It was a good set up for more casual play in which the characters get together, brave the ruins and get out by the end of the session. This method allows you the flexibility to have different numbers of players from session to session.

I liked the rules for the most part. It was nice to only carry d10s. Random starting career selection was fun. There is also a lot of nice bonus material at the offical web site, including some creature and spell cards that were very handy for the module. Ulric's fury is neat. I also like that magic may be touched by chaos or bring the wrath of the gods.

The thing that I changed was combat. I made all the lesser foes have zero starting wounds and subject to sudden death critical hits immediately. That alteration made the player characters much more powerful and heroic, but they were still in mortal peril often. The big foes (usually the named ones) had wounds just like the heroes, which made them more memorable. (I really kind of stole this idea from Savage Worlds.) I just didn't want to track wounds (hit points) for all the minions. It worked pretty well.

The things that didn't work so well included all the die rolling in combat. All the parries and dodges take rolls. It is fine for the heroes and gives them a little edge, but a group of foes with shields will bog down a combat because they all get parries. There are even more rolls for criticals, which can get tiresome even with the more streamlined system of sudden death criticals. I also just didn't really grasp all the magic. It was easy enough to gloss over with the bad guys, but it was there. One player felt a little underpowered in combat, which is due to some disparity in careers.

Overall, we had fun with it. I don't know if we will reprise it, but I am keeping it on the shelf for a while.

 

[Chupacabra]

Welcome to Warhammer. Get ready to have some serious fun as a GM! Your players will NOT be strutting around after X level -- unafraid of the bad guys, unafraid of the critters, unafraid of the local townies/police/etc. They will always be a couple of bad rolls away from death and that leads to much more deliberate (and dare I say realistic) gameplay.

Fun times ahead. Good luck showing them the light. Its not that its better than D&D, its just so different that that alone makes it great. Kinda like a cheeseburger is wonderful, but pizza is wonderful too. Time to put the cheeseburger down for awhile...

 

[Dagger75]

Another thing I love, the PC's actually use silver. They HATE paying for tolls and sleeping in an inn is a nice change of things. Springing for a private room is something special. They don't walk into a bar throwing down 10 gold for a dinner. They buy the common meal or go out to thier wagon and eat the lovel trail rations they have.

I love making them roll to see if the village they are in has the sword for sale. Healing is a big deal. I make them write descriptions of critical wounds inflicted on thier character sheets. The poor elves are battle scarred, the dwarf is not, weird.

Planning for adventures is EASY. Goblins and orcs are still tough, they hate Black Orks and ogres. I don't think they will like the troll this week