But just the basics involves picking out the right set of dice from 6 different kinds, and then interpreting the results from 8 different symbols? (I think those numbers are correct?) It's not as bad as I had initially feared - being able to pair off most of the results so that you only have to deal with successes or failures and banes or boons certainly helps, but that's still pretty involved for a single die roll. In combat I know that handles both hit / miss and damage, but I can do the same thing in 4e by making an impromptu "die pool" out of my d20 and whatever I need for damage dice. I think the real question is going to be how much "action" a single die roll encompasses.
Once you've learned the basics, the different kinds of die don't really factor into the difficulty of assembling the dice pool. You just grab dice for your characteristic and stance, dice for your skill, and dice for spending fortune. The fact that some of those are blue, some red or green, some yellow and some white just becomes second nature by the end of a session.
It seems to me that each die roll is meant to be more interesting / meaningful; if that's the case can we expect to be making fewer rolls overall? I'm also wondering about the odds: how likely is it for a typical roll to succeed? That's probably a lot more important in combat, where a miss means a longer fight and more rolling.
misses are surprisingly rare in combat (maybe one in four attacks miss), and combat is over pretty quickly.
(One thing that kind of bothers me, if I've got this right, is that "reckless" dice apparently have several negative options not on normal / conservative dice, but still have the same total number of successes - they're just bunched up. Wouldn't that tend to make the reckless stance strictly worse than any other?)
The reckless dice have banes on them, but they also have more boons than the conservative die. Both the reckless and conservative dice have their special drawback symbols (exertion and delay respectively) while the characteristic dice do not, but they also have more successes.
I'd be interested to know if there is (or can be) any story built in to the process of gathering / rolling the dice. My worry is that the extra complication on that end of the process is going to end up overshadowing any extra cool story bits.
I've found it useful to narrate the circumstances as I gather up the dice pool--describing how the darkness makes spotting a target difficult as I assign a misfortune die to an archer's attack, or describing an opponent's attack as exceptionally skillful as I spend their expertise. I think it works especially well when I describe how the side effect of some previous action (boons or banes on previous checks that went unspent at the time) now aids or hinders their current attempt (fortune or misfortune dice).
One last thing - how does managing all of the cards work out in actual play? [...] I'm especially worried about conditions and critical wounds, since that's the kind of thing that's liable to end up getting missed, and going back and retroactively applying them is gonna kinda suck...
Critical wounds are the only thing I see causing problems here, being fairly common and relatively minor in effect. Conditions are rare enough and powerful enough that they won't be forgotten. Haven't seen enough insanities in play to know how they'll work out, and as you mention, the limit on talents make them easy to track.
How integrated is the setting into the system?
Could I use the game for another fantasy setting, like FR or Eberron?
The magic of WFRP is rare and setting specific. While I could see using this to run Greyhawk, FR and Eberron are both a little bit too high-magic to thrive under these rules.
