Got a chance to play on sunday, and loved it. I'll be picking this game up as soon as I finish my current campaign. Not familiar with previous editions of WFRP, so I can't speak to thematic concerns, but anyone who avoids this game because it looks like a board game is doing themselves a disservice.
The dice system is simpler than it looks--it'll be second instinct by the end of your first session. This feels like the sort of dice rolling you do in story-emphasis games like World of Darkness or 7th sea, rather than more combat emphasis games like D&D.
The only use of cards that seemed boardgame-like was being dealt three possible careers from the career deck and choosing one. But apparently, previous editions did the same thing, only with percentile rolls. In general, cards seem to replace things that would be on randomized tables in other games (i.e. critical hits), or are entirely non-randomized and put in card form purely for ease of use (i.e. action cards)
Had a chance to look through some of the rule books. I'm pleased to say that the Wizard and Priest books are 75% setting info, and only 25% rules. Presumably the other too books are a bit crunchier.
responses to specific posts below the fold:
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Are the dice faces carved in, or are they just printed on like the doom dice? Those doom dice wore away far too fast for rpg use.
carved in--and far more deeply than I've seen on most other dice. The dice themselves seem to be made of a harder plastic that your average rpg dice too.
and what about minis, movement and tactical positioning in combat?
cardboard character standees--if your familiar with the character markers from arkham horror, these are the same thing. Looks like there was one for each career, plus a number for various monsters. Movement was very abstract--you were either at long range, medium range, short range, or engaged in melee. The action cards tie into this--My archer had a covering fire ability that gave penalties to all enemies in an engagement, and a sneak attack ability whose target must be engaged with an ally--and being bow abilities, they both required me to not be engaged myself.
More importantly, what support for out of combat abilities does that system give?
By itself, the dice pool system adds a lot of character to out-of-combat skill use--where in D&D, you might just roll a climb check to climb a steep mountain, in WFRP3, you have to decide whether you're going to be reckless (and potentially risk injuring yourself) or be conservative (and risk delay) the GM can assign fortune or misfortune dice to checks--theoretically not much different than the ubiquitous +2/-2 modifiers in D&D, but the tangibility makes them much more obvious, and I expect it will have players paying much more attention to the circumstances of their actions.
Talents (especially reputation talents) and special actions add to this. So far, one of the coolest things I have seen in the game is an out of combat action card. Action cards are all double sided, and you choose the side corresponding to your stance--In this particular card, the reckless side of the card had "drunken carousing", while the conservative side had "formal diplomacy"
I think I'm selling this game to my groups as the new Warhammer Quest campaign. I think the expectations for WFRP are just different than this game delivers. It seems like a great game, I think for me I just had to let go of it being a pure RPG and embrace it as an Advanced Heroquest or Road to Legend type game.
This strikes me as wrong-headed. People coming to the table expecting to find the WFRP they know and love
might be disappointed by the changes in the new edition. But people coming to the table expecting Warhammer Quest
are bound to be disappointed.
It sounds interesting but also very different to WHFRP as I remember it. I only played and DM'ed 1st edition WHFRP and the thing I really liked about it was, once one was familar with the system, one could run a game without reference to the books except for chargen.
This version does not appear to have that simplicity. So I have a couple of questions about the feel of the game.
Is is a dangerous to the PCs as the old warhammer?
Is it still careers based? (can you be a rat catcher?)
You can definitely play this game without the books once you're familiar with the system. Anything you'd conceivably need to look up is now on a card. It's still career-based (though apparently the rat-catcher isn't in the core set). At my table, there was a human agent, a high-elven scholar, a wood-elf scout (me), and a dwarven coachman.[/SBLOCK]
Ok, that's a lie, I love numbers; I hate arithmetic. 
