Warhammer frpg - 2e vs 4e

[Ancalagon]

The real shame of it all is that the art is amazing, the setting is wonderful, and The Enemy Within campaign is probably as good of a published adventure that has ever existed in this hobby. It's just that the system is a bit on the wonky side. Had this been made for D&D, I think it would've blown any of the official products out of the water in the opinion of many groups.

The enemy within existed far before 4e did though...

 

[Ancalagon]

SLs alone aren’t enough to remove the whiff factor.

I have played extensively with wh frpg 2e and troika! (which has an opposed skill check combat resolution system).

It is simple mathematics that an opposed system reduces whiffiness, and in my opinion, sufficiently so. Allow me to demonstrate.

In warhammer 2e, at lower level, your WS tended to be poor - say 33%. Your attack had thus roughly 2/3 chance of missing from the get go - and then your foe had a chance (not great) of blocking/parrying (say 33% again), so only 22% of your hits landed. That IS whiffy.

(I'll note that aim and charge helped a bit for this, but whatever)

If you were a powerful warrior (say WS 66%) vs a low skilled for (ws 33% for the parry), your chance of landing that blow was 44%, which is better, but not amazing. Vs an equally skilled foe, you were back to a 22% chance of hitting.

(meanwhile, the unskilled fighter only has a 11% chance of hitting the skilled warrior)

But if you have an opposed check, this whiffiness vanishes. If your foe is equally good, you have 50% chance of hitting said foe! And it doesn't matter if it's two drunken peasants or 2 highly skilled duelists!

Hitting 50% of the time is not whiffy.

If it's the skilled fighter vs the unskilled one, the skilled fighter's blows will land 66% of the time (if my math is correct), so again, a clear improvement. However, the low skilled warrior's chance of hitting remains 11%.

So the problem was solved. What does advantage add to the situation?

 

[Ancalagon]

In 3e I made a dwarf slayer that could kill a dragon in solo combat. Then a ratcatcher who was instantly killed by a goblin. The fact that such a wide gulf existed between character power levels told me the system wasn't for me.

that's cool, but we aren't talking about that edition

 

[Ancalagon]

Can we at least agree that 3e was a bad system?

I don't known it well enough, but it didn't appeal to me at all.

 

[Retreater]

The enemy within existed far before 4e did though...

Very true. But getting print copies in 4e is much easier (and affordable).

 

[overgeeked]

I have played extensively with wh frpg 2e and troika! (which has an opposed skill check combat resolution system).

It is simple mathematics that an opposed system reduces whiffiness, and in my opinion, sufficiently so. Allow me to demonstrate.

In warhammer 2e, at lower level, your WS tended to be poor - say 33%. Your attack had thus roughly 2/3 chance of missing from the get go - and then your foe had a chance (not great) of blocking/parrying (say 33% again), so only 22% of your hits landed. That IS whiffy.

(I'll note that aim and charge helped a bit for this, but whatever)

If you were a powerful warrior (say WS 66%) vs a low skilled for (ws 33% for the parry), your chance of landing that blow was 44%, which is better, but not amazing. Vs an equally skilled foe, you were back to a 22% chance of hitting.

(meanwhile, the unskilled fighter only has a 11% chance of hitting the skilled warrior)

But if you have an opposed check, this whiffiness vanishes. If your foe is equally good, you have 50% chance of hitting said foe! And it doesn't matter if it's two drunken peasants or 2 highly skilled duelists!

Hitting 50% of the time is not whiffy.

If it's the skilled fighter vs the unskilled one, the skilled fighter's blows will land 66% of the time (if my math is correct), so again, a clear improvement. However, the low skilled warrior's chance of hitting remains 11%.

So the problem was solved. What does advantage add to the situation?

If it’s opposed rolls where someone is guaranteed to hit, either the attacker hitting the defender or the defender hitting the attacker, then the whiff factor vanishes entirely.

 

[TheSword]

I have played extensively with wh frpg 2e and troika! (which has an opposed skill check combat resolution system).

It is simple mathematics that an opposed system reduces whiffiness, and in my opinion, sufficiently so. Allow me to demonstrate.

In warhammer 2e, at lower level, your WS tended to be poor - say 33%. Your attack had thus roughly 2/3 chance of missing from the get go - and then your foe had a chance (not great) of blocking/parrying (say 33% again), so only 22% of your hits landed. That IS whiffy.

(I'll note that aim and charge helped a bit for this, but whatever)

If you were a powerful warrior (say WS 66%) vs a low skilled for (ws 33% for the parry), your chance of landing that blow was 44%, which is better, but not amazing. Vs an equally skilled foe, you were back to a 22% chance of hitting.

(meanwhile, the unskilled fighter only has a 11% chance of hitting the skilled warrior)

But if you have an opposed check, this whiffiness vanishes. If your foe is equally good, you have 50% chance of hitting said foe! And it doesn't matter if it's two drunken peasants or 2 highly skilled duelists!

Hitting 50% of the time is not whiffy.

If it's the skilled fighter vs the unskilled one, the skilled fighter's blows will land 66% of the time (if my math is correct), so again, a clear improvement. However, the low skilled warrior's chance of hitting remains 11%.

So the problem was solved. What does advantage add to the situation?

I think advantage adds the tactical decision of do you fight defensively for a round to break the advantage, do you risk disengaging to remove the enemies advantage even if you take a hit, do you gang up on a single foe to overcome them, knowing you’re leaving someone else free. For me advantage adds tactical decisions and makes combat about more than just hitting a person over the head repeatedly until they’re dead, the moving to the next person. There are also some interesting talents that play off advantage like reversal to turn the tables on people who’re winning.

In my experience Advantage swings back and forth across a combat and gives a level of drama to a fight that is quite satisfying.

 

[TheSword]

The enemy within existed far before 4e did though...

3/5 of it existed. The remaining two books are either brand new or new enough to resemble little of what came before. They are excellent.

 

[Ancalagon]

If it’s opposed rolls where someone is guaranteed to hit, either the attacker hitting the defender or the defender hitting the attacker, then the whiff factor vanishes entirely.

That's how Troika! does it, and it does have benefits... but it has weird consequences, especially when a group of low-skilled foes (say a bunch of goblins) take on a master swordsman.

With an opposed check but the defender not hitting on a win, this is still a dangerous proposition for the goblins - they are getting in range of the swordsman' deadly attacks, and they have to hope to be able to land enough him to take him down before he kills too many of them.

When it's like troika!, the more goblins attack, the more the swordsman is dangerous. So basically they could ALL get killed in a single round - each attack attempt against the master swordsman is, in most cases, one more hit vs the goblins.

 

[Ancalagon]

I need to oppose the notion that WFRP4 is just like any other game - "every game has its fans and its haters".

That's relativistic, and would mean there can't be good games and bad games.

WFRP4 is a bad game with terrible design. It enthusiastically just adds new subsystems, modifiers and rules with no awareness of how complex and cluttery the finished product ends up as. Everything has been made more complex than WFRP2, just making the game worse.

Most if not all of the additions (compared to WFRP2) just doesn't work. Some change the way the world work in ways that aren't appreciated. People must wear armor. Parties must have healers or they die from random injuries. They don't properly die from critical hits (instead they succumb from bleeding out). None of the new additions to magic work (at least you can ignore the new abilities).

Other rules just break the game. It's trivial to increase a Characteristic/Skill to a level no NPC can withstand. All the little modifiers make WFRP a game a magnitude more complex than it used to be. Everything works slightly differently. Talents need to be remembered, all the time... and they too exacerbate the effect of the skilled steamrolling regular opposition. Advantage transforms combats into things where only two things matter: accumulating your own Advantage while shooting down foes that are starting to accumulate Advantage of their own. This rewards playing the meta game where you take actions that make no sense in-game but optimize abstract combat rules. Shooting arrows and magic missiles become king simply because they can't be dodged/parried.

If you want to actually argue a given rule has its merit, is decently implemented, and adds value to your game, please do. But please don't simply dismiss the specific and detailed criticism against the edition given here. This isn't a case of somebody just not liking the system, while others do like it, so it's a wash, just like most games.

I really appreciate your input on this discussion and your observation. And it is true that "some people like it, some people don't" is ... not really saying much. I tentatively agree with you that it doesn't look good... B

BUT - when you say "It's trivial to increase a Characteristic/Skill to a level no NPC can withstand." and other people have pointed out, more than once, that to increase one characteristic really high requires a very significant XP investment, and you still call it trivial... it sorts of undermines your arguments :/