Review of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

[Jonny Nexus]

Other than the [snip] the use of a unified die rolling mechanic

Sorry, are you seriously trying to argue that the concept of a unified die rolling mechanic as a design objective for a game was first seen in D&D 3rd Ed?

Erm... GURPS? D6 Star Wars? The various White Wolf systems? Just off the top of my head...

 

[tetsujin28]

You think that's not true? I think you fell for the Renaissance propaganda of the so-called "Dark Ages". (snip lots of good and true stuff)

Which would be why many scholars have renamed the "Dark Ages" Late Antiquity, and the "Renaissance" Early Modern.

 

[tetsujin28]

Sorry, are you seriously trying to argue that the concept of a unified die rolling mechanic as a design objective for a game was first seen in D&D 3rd Ed?

Erm... GURPS? D6 Star Wars? The various White Wolf systems? Just off the top of my head...

Villains & Vigilantes? Ars Magica (which Jonathan Tweet co-designed)?

 

[Jonny Nexus]

I wrote in my original review:

"It will not be a good game for people who want an ad hoc quickie one-shot adventure with a "bring your own PC" approach."



If you believe that the "ad hoc quickie one-shot adventure" will feature brand new PCs, I'll accept your premise. If you're telling me that you could sit down with a group of strangers and cook up a workable party of advanced PCs that an ad hoc GM could challenge in a fun and effective way faster than I could do that task with a group of strangers for D&D, I'll disagree.

My direct experience is that ad hoc games are the least likely to be run with absolute new PCs, other than when people "just want to try the game". When experienced players gather, they'll have binders of PCs ready to play, or will be able to map out a character quickly based on prior experience.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you appear to be saying that when you said:

"It will not be a good game for people who want an ad hoc quickie one-shot adventure with a "bring your own PC" approach."

...what you were actually meaning was:

"If you have a group of players who have previously played D&D and already have D&D characters created, but who have not previously played WFRP, then D&D will be a better, and faster, system for GMing a one-shot scenario for them than WFRP."

...which is just a tad different.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Villains & Vigilantes? Ars Magica (which Jonathan Tweet co-designed)?

Exactly. I'd suggest that probably every game designed from the mid-eighties onwards had a unified die mechanic. In fact, I seem to recall that this was generally the criticism thrown at 2nd Ed D&D (that it *didn't* have a unified die mechanic).

 

[S'mon]

BTW 13-20 is a 40% chance of success, not 35%. So to convert WFRP to D&D you need a base DC of 21 not 20...

 

[delericho]

Note: We were discussing character power levels not character concepts. In my review, I stated that the excellent WFRP character system will lead to a population of very distinct and interesting characters, as opposed to D&D.

I understand that. However, I still don't think it's a fair complaint. If you remove all of the D&D material supporting play at levels above 13th (that was your example, wasn't it?), you're removing a good 40% of the spells and monsters from the game.

 

[Balbinus]

I think that part of the disconnect may be that people are reading a lot of stuff into the book that isn't there, based on their previous experiences with Warhammer Fantasy, the novels, the miniatures game, and the older RP stuff. I'm not disagreeing with anyone who says that's where the setting is going, or that's how the game is to be played - I'm simply saying that you can't base those conclusions on the WFRP book itself.

Leaving aside the discussion on the Renaissance, where I agree Ryan has gone a bit astray in terms of his knowledge of the relevant history, I think the above is a good comment. This is a setting in which the king rides a gryphon into battle, a game where if a PC dies there is a mechanic giving you an extra life just like in a video game, a game which when it came out led to several hundred post threads on rpg.net about how they had changed the setting to make it more high fantasy and how some stuff from DnD seemed to have crept in.

If you didn't already know the game how would you see it? It's a fair question, I'm not persuaded that as the game now stands it's the fantasy CoC everyone thinks it is. First edition was that, I'm not persuaded second is.

Otherwise I think partly Ryan is getting a kicking because of who he is, others have made similar comments without anything like this kind of backlash.

 

[Ian Sturrock]

I love the way that Mr Dancey's complaints about WFRP 2.0 seem to boil down to "it's derivative of D&D 3.0 -- look, all sorts of features that D&D 3.0 borrowed from WFRP 1.0!" but his complaints about the Old World Bestiary seem to boil down to "it's not derivative of D&D 3.0 -- look, no treasure tables!"

As one of the writing team behind the "average or below-average quality, stream of conscious, intentionally error-riddled fiction" in the Bestiary, I must declare some bias. Fortunately, I don't feel the need to worry overmuch about the comments of someone whose 'critical faculties' are so finely tuned he can't even spell the name of the book he's reviewing.

 

[S'mon]

I love the way that Mr Dancey's complaints about WFRP 2.0 seem to boil down to "it's derivative of D&D 3.0 -- look, all sorts of features that D&D 3.0 borrowed from WFRP 1.0!"

Yeah, I think that level of ignorance of history is on a par with the old "We saved your butts from the Nazis!" (by American, directed at a Brit) in its ability to rile people up.