Review of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

[Belen]

I find your sincerity and honesty as compelling as ever.

Did you witness the execution of your pound puppy at a very young age?

 

[Belen]

finally, one thought: if you have problems with people attacking other people, you should turn the tones down. it seems to me that most of your posts on these boards (not rpg.net) have the kind of tone that says: "say all you want, but Ryan rocks". maybe he does, but if all you have to say is complaining about people "attacking him" (even when they are making legitimate point in a civil, albeit somewhat heated discussion), you are not doing much to prevent said discussion from turning into a war...

Nope. I could care less about Ryan. It is the undercurrent of anti-d20 elitism that gets on my nerves. (And the RPGnet thread is anything but a civil argument.)

I can guarantee you that had the rules been "derived" from GURPS or had the review been by Joe Nobody, then there would not be such an uproar.

Yet, compare a game to D&D, the game that the senseless masses play, and you get to sit back and watch the flamefest.

I think it is the ant-establishment "damn" the man tendency among gamers that make them look upon the guy on top and feel a need to take him down a peg.

As for the review, I thought it was good. It got me interested in Warhammer despite its fans.

 

[The Shaman]

I think it is the ant-establishment "damn" the man tendency among gamers that make them look upon the guy on top and feel a need to take him down a peg.

For what it's worth, I'd never heard of Ryan Dancey until a few weeks ago, knew nothing about his role in bringing 3.0 to market, nothing about his participation in GAMA (and I have no idea what GAMA is, for that matter, nor am I interested).

After seeing his posts here along with his review and reading an interview with him from some years ago, I understand why he has his detractors.

As far as the excitement over his review, there's no escaping the fact that he is (as I've since learned) a player of sorts in the gaming business - he's not Joe Blow writing a review, and to expect that he be treated is such is perhaps a bit naïve.

 

[Henry]

i mean that i'm not buying a game that has:
1. a vanilla flavoured medieval europe setting with a little addition of a chaos and demonic theme
2. a game system that is obviously derivative from another, which comes accorss from being a lot more flexible
3. a game system whose bestiary is obviously overpriced when compared with the market standard... maybe i should've made my point clearer?

I was curious because you said you'd never buy an obviously derivative work, yet that's what the majority of the RPG systems available are, in some form -- derivative works. I understand you saying you wouldn't buy it if it were as "cookie cutter" as the review implies to you, but saying, "NO derivative game systems" just didn't sound right.

having said that, you can't really blame other people to have that attitude when some people here don't act differently. i wonder if there would have been such an outcry, in these boards, if somebody was attacking, say, sandy petersen...i very much doubt so!

Neither can you, because as I said there's always a contingent of naysayers... and as I said, in the RPG community it's frequently the same people from board to board!

And at least one person would have said something had Sandy been attacked, because he's one of my favorite game designers.

 

[Faraer]

I agree that the review of the core book is better after the revision. I still think that the review of the OWB is pretty bad -- it essentially misses the whole point of the Warhammer setting. For example, to complain that there are no 'treasure tables' demonstrates a failure to grasp that WFRP is not about 'killing and looting'. WFRP is about trying to stay alive, and keeping your sanity, in a fundamentally hostile world -- one where wealth is measured in brass pennies, and the only magical items are legendary.

And even the request for '"How to make a monster" rules' indicates misconceptions that this is a game about lots of surprising monsters (like D&D) and that systems need 'rules' to make up monster stats (like current D&D). As I said, it's entirely inadequate as a review. The actual negative criticism responsible for the 2-star rating is as follows:

If you can figure out for yourself why demons, orcs, skaven, dragons, ogres, and vampires are evil and should be killed & looted, you may wonder what you're supposed to do with 65 pages of average or below-average quality, stream of conscious, intentionally error-riddled fiction.

First is the insinuation that the material says nothing more than that the monsters 'are evil and should be killed & looted'. It's either demonstrably wrong if literal, since anyone with the book could quote more information than that, or snide and sarcastic (and uninformative) if not. The 'looted' part is wrong, since loot is hardly mentioned. The assertion that it's not obvious why the information is unreliable is also transparently wrong (it's explained in the introduction). It is not 'stream of conscious[ness]' (writing which attempts to reproduce interior conscious experience). That leaves 'average or below-average quality': maybe so, but just asserting so without explaining the opinion is of no use to anyone.

The reader may find this ... boring repetition of materials already covered by a hundred other products, depending on the reader's perspective.

The implication that (a reasonable reader might find that) Warhammer world monsters have nothing distinctive about them is, again, either demonstrably false or snide, and either way, again the assertion is useless without back-up.

The value for the price is just not justified

This claim is, once more, unsupported except for the indirect and unsubstantiated complaints about quality and an equally vague claim that '5 pages are consumed with zero usable content of any kind (full page "art" that isn't art)' -- I don't even know what pages are referred to.

It barely deals at all with how good the book is -- how well it succeeds in presenting a range of interesting, believable, and dynamic monsters. It doesn't mention how well the book represents the Warhammer world, how well put together the stats are, whether there are major omissions, how well the authors (T.S. Luikart and Ian Sturrock, who aren't even named) manage the multiple voices, or how well the art and text evoke the right atmosphere. It doesn't attempt to give any kind of vivid representation of what the book is like. It's not a review.

 

[Turjan]

I can guarantee you that had the rules been "derived" from GURPS or had the review been by Joe Nobody, then there would not be such an uproar.

Yet, compare a game to D&D, the game that the senseless masses play, and you get to sit back and watch the flamefest.

Don't forget that Ryan asked for his review being discussed here! Additionally, this review must be seen as part of the heated rules-light vs. rules-heavy discussion, where the idea of the WFRP2 review came up in the first place. Coincidentally, that thread rose back up from the depths of the forum again.

This is, btw, why I don't criticize the review for all its comparisons between WFRP2 and D&D 3E; that was part of the deal. In the old thread, Ryan was confronted with the statement that WFRP2 is a game that is at least as good as D&D 3E but needs much less rules and leaves more breathing room for the DM. I suspect that's why the review is like it is; it wants to address this statement. It fell a bit short of an adequate discussion of WFRP2's peculiarities in this process and there were some factual errors paired with a somewhat unfortunate wording, and you get what you got.

This means that you cannot expect this review to be treated like some piece by Joe Nobody. It has its particular context.

 

[tarchon]

I find your sincerity and honesty as compelling as ever.

I don't really think this helps things too much. It's one thing to point out that the review is flawed and say why it is flawed, but I don't see any reason to think that it was written dishonestly. The tendency to interpret a thing in terms of what one is most familiar with is a perfectly normal human trait.

 

[Mark CMG]

This thread is, IMO, somewhat, not-unlike, derivative of things similar to off-shoots of-


Hang on a sec. I believe I had a point when I started typing...

 

[Breakdaddy]

I don't really think this helps things too much. It's one thing to point out that the review is flawed and say why it is flawed, but I don't see any reason to think that it was written dishonestly. The tendency to interpret a thing in terms of what one is most familiar with is a perfectly normal human trait.

EDIT - Name calling DEFINITELY not a good idea. -Henry

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Hang on a sec. I believe I had a point when I started typing...

That seems to be an epidemic with regards to this thread and the use of the word "derivative."