Warhammer 3e Demo Experiences -OR- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bits

[Wrathamon]

Do you have a sense of the scalability yet of the challenge dice? For instance, in a where it was straight math, I'd know what a -5 meant (give or take) and be able to judge its impact on the fly. I don't have that sense yet with the numberless dice. How significant is 1 challenge die compared to 3?

I havent played enough to master it yet - I'm still finding encounter balance to have a learning curve that I found in 4e to be very minor.

The dice breakdown as follows

• Characteristic d8 (Blue): Success x4, Boon x2
• Challenge d8 (Purple): Double Fail x2, Fail, x2, Double Bane, Bane, Chaos Star
• Reckless d10 (Red): Double Success x2, (Success+Fatigue) x2, (Success+Boon), Double Boon, Bane x2
• Conservative d10 (Green): Success x4, (Success+Boon), Boon x2, (Success+Delay) x2
• Expertise d6 (Yellow): Success, Righteous Success, Boon x2, Sigmar's Comet
• Fortune d6 (white): Success x2, Boon
• Misfortune d6 (Black): fail x2, Bane

You can predict the odds a bit...
Blue dice have a 50% chance of showing up as a success, while purple pretty much have bad stuff... 50% change of some sort of Fail, 25% of which being a double fail.

you HIT way more often in WFRP 3e then you do in D&D 4e but how successful you are when you hit is a bit harder to predict.

 

[Asmor]

I havent played enough to master it yet - I'm still finding encounter balance to have a learning curve that I found in 4e to be very minor.

The dice breakdown as follows

• Characteristic d8 (Blue): Success x4, Boon x2
• Challenge d8 (Purple): Double Fail x2, Fail, x2, Double Bane, Bane, Chaos Star
• Reckless d10 (Red): Double Success x2, (Success+Fatigue) x2, (Success+Boon), Double Boon, Bane x2
• Conservative d10 (Green): Success x4, (Success+Boon), Boon x2, (Success+Delay) x2
• Expertise d6 (Yellow): Success, Righteous Success, Boon x2, Sigmar's Comet
• Fortune d6 (white): Success x2, Boon
• Misfortune d6 (Black): fail x2, Bane

You can predict the odds a bit...
Blue dice have a 50% chance of showing up as a success, while purple pretty much have bad stuff... 50% change of some sort of Fail, 25% of which being a double fail.

you HIT way more often in WFRP 3e then you do in D&D 4e but how successful you are when you hit is a bit harder to predict.

I'd disagree a bit... The damage you do is fairly static. Weapon damage + characteristic score (str or agi). The results you roll can modify that a bit, but usually don't add more than a few points of damage and I don't think I've seen anything that reduces the damage you do.

On the topic of dice, I think it's helpful to assign each die an 'expected value.' For example, fortune dice have 2 successes, no failures, and 6 sides, so an expected value of +1/3. Misfortune dice are the opposite, and have an expected value of -1/3.

Here are the expected values for each die, based on the faces you listed above (which look right enough that I don't feel the need to verify). If you actually want to use this info in play, I'd recommend just memorizing the success values. That should be fairly simple.

• Characteristic d8 (Blue): +.5 success, +.25 boon
• Challenge d8 (Purple): -.75 success, -.375 boon, +.125 chaos star
• Reckless d10 (Red): +.6 success, +.3 boon, +.2 fatigue
• Conservative d10 (Green): +.7 success, +.3 boon, +.2 delay
• Expertise d6 (Yellow): +.4 success*, +.33 boon, +.17 sigmar's comet
• Fortune d6 (white): +.33 success, +.17 boon
• Misfortune d6 (Black): -.33 success, -.17 boon

*My statistics is a bit rusty, so I'm just estimating the effect of the righteous success (which explodes) as a +.07 to the successes on the expertise die. I suspect that should be reasonably close, if not perfect.

In general, any characteristic die (including stance dice) is inferior to a challenge die on a 1:1 basis. A conservative die is almost enough to cancel one out.

 

[Filcher]

This is really helpful. Thanks guys. I hope to get a quick battle in before the parties tonight.

Ah ... geekdom. It's all about priorities.

 

[Filcher]

• Reckless d10 (Red): Double Success x2, (Success+Fatigue) x2, (Success+Boon), Double Boon, Bane x2
• Conservative d10 (Green): Success x4, (Success+Boon), Boon x2, (Success+Delay) x2

Exerting yourself risks fatigue, being conservative risks delay. Now this is starting to make sense.

There is a lot of cool nuance, but it takes a little digging to get there. Thanks again for the help.

 

[Asmor]

[/LIST]
Exerting yourself risks fatigue

The reckless stance dice also have faces with 2 successes, as well as faces with failures, meaning that they tend to roll really, really well or really, really poorly.

 

[C_M2008]

Didn't play yesterday,due to holiday issues, but have made up a few characters. We were really impressed with the speed of character creation though. In about 20 minutes I was able to help a player completely finish a character, not accounting for the RP elements. I haven't seen character generation that fast since I played 2e D&D(core rules not skills & powers).

We decided to go random and rolled for race as well as doing the pick 3 for careers. The First person got a high elf, and chose scout as a career.
I'm not gong to get terribly in depth as the process is well documented already, but it was quite simple and seemed fairly intuitive once we begun. The longest part was deciding which talents and powers to select.

In any regard it's a simple process with a fair bit of depth and customability although it seems like the 4 skills is going to be the choice 90% of the time, but that's really the only false choice I noticed. The speed is certainly an asset as well. Color me impressed so far.

I still hope to get my impressions down after we actually play, so hopefully next weekend I'll have something more tangible to add.

 

[Filcher]

[rant]
The best thing about WHFR3e? It's keeping me from posting to all the inane edition war/sand box war/whatever war threads. I've actually won back hours that would have otherwise been spent in frustration, and this is now the one thread I read on Enworld.

The worst thing about WHFR3e? The presentation of the rules. Atrocious.
[/rant]

I'm sure I must have misread the rules around stances and short breaks, so please correct me if I'm wrong:

Edit: Never mind. Figured it out.

 

[Filcher]

Speaking of inane, I'm working on house rules for a game I haven't even played yet.

Do you guys think it would be overly wonky to rule that PC crits on henchmen = immediate death? I like some of the dynamics that came with 4e minions, and I want PC crits to have a little more oomph.

And also, I'm thinking of going to battle maps, just to help PCs imagine the terrain more clearly. Not so worried about movement, obviously, but want to encourage "I duck behind the rock wall," sort of play.

 

[Filcher]

Finally had the chance to run my first session last night. Dice pool was a breeze and very enjoyable. Locating rules continues to be a major hassle, though the living index helps (http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/f...t/warhammer-fantasy-roleplay-living-index.pdf). I'm most impressed w/ the magic systems, though we haven't seen them in play yet.

Today I'm photocopying the character sheets and blowing them up to full page size, and compiling a reference sheet.

Good gaming, all!

 

[Wrathamon]

yes finding rules is a pain... even during character creation.

Note to other game designers. Box out or Bullet point your rules. I hate having to read paragraphs of descriptive text to find the one line that says what I actually need.

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the magic system is interesting. The idea u have to channel to gain energy to power your spells. If you overchannel you''re at risk.

Which i couldnt figure out if you can choose not to take all the energy you gain from the dice roll?

I made an apprentice wizard to test out the rules. And I rolled crazy once and was over double my willpower and had all the problems trying to maintain control of that much power. Magic system works very well with the dice pool system and their stress/fatigue system.

I think for new players the Bright order is probably the easiest to play, the Grey seemed the hardest imo. But, that is just from reading the spells and testing a bright order wizard in play. I could be wrong.

Overall finding where all the rules are is the main problem I have with the game and the stat blocks for the monsters. Playing a game is probably a lot more fun than running one... there are a lot of things to keep track of.

I probably will stick with 4e, unless I find/create a summarized rules sheet.

Too many times questions came up and I was like I know I read about that somewhere... then couldnt find the rule or had no idea where to even start to look for a rule or if there was one for it.

I just found the index online - so that might help.