Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

[kitsune9]

Well, PC survivability is helped immensely when your GM can't make attack rolls for crap 90& of the time. And the few times he does hit, it's either a pitiful damage roll or the target manages to dodge or parry the attack.

GM: "The lead Orc scores a mighty hit..."
Elf PC: "Finally hit something other than air."
GM: "Shush you. He bellows fiercely as his choppa crashes into your side for... 6 points of damage."
Me: "So between my Toughness bonus and my armor, I take... no damage, right?"
GM: "Blasted Bretonnians and their gorram armor."
Dwarf PC: "Hey, at least Sir Clanksalot couldn't parry or dodge this one."
GM: "Oh shut up and just kill the pathetic blighter already!"

The above is from one of our last few game sessions before the GM's work schedule changed to prevent him from being able to game with us on a regular basis. Which is a shame because the campaign he was running was quite a lot of fun, as he was willing to step out of the "GrimDark" mindset and allow some of the PCs to be a bit happier than what the norm might suggest.

Wolff96,
I can agree whole-heartedly on the "face" of the party being a vital component of a group. Ours was an Entertainer, and I think she transitioned into Rogue. While she wasn't much of a combatant (was a very good knife thrower as well as superb dancer), she proved a great boon on helping us to avoid quite a few scrapes by virtue of her silver tongue, even with some members of the Imperial nobility. Of course, she was quite happy to let the Knight Errant and Troll Slayer take center stage when butts needed to be whupped. And she certainly did keep things lively with a few of her antics.

I ran a WFRP 1e campaign with a similar thing. One of my players had a dwarf who maxed out toughness and armor, and the only way to really even start to hurt him was through Ulric's Fury. Any of the other players got their characters churned into butter if Ulric's Fury was rolled on them. One player I think went through five or six characters in the overall campaign.

 

[wolff96]

I ran a WFRP 1e campaign with a similar thing. One of my players had a dwarf who maxed out toughness and armor, and the only way to really even start to hurt him was through Ulric's Fury. Any of the other players got their characters churned into butter if Ulric's Fury was rolled on them. One player I think went through five or six characters in the overall campaign.

I'm lucky -- my dwarf is a Slayer. He only wears armor on his arms and legs (pants and what we call Vambraces) because a hat would interfere with his crest and a chest-piece would obscure his tattoos...

The one that worries me is the Sigmarite. I think his Toughness is around 40 now and he'll soon be buying plate armor... That makes him one tough hombre. Fortunately, he can't roll percentiles to save his life.

The wannabe witch-hunter is a pretty tough customer, really, but he has some horrendous luck. The party face -- going into Master Thief these days, after all his underworld contact in Altdorf -- is getting respectable with his crossbow. The Elf Wizard? Yeah, she nearly got killed in an alley once while being 'discouraged' from an investigation. After Toughness, I think she took 7 wounds from a dagger. And at the time, I think she had around 10 wounds total...

--------------------------------

There's one catch to all of this, though... up until now, they've faced nothing more dangerous than a minor demon and some cultists. And *that* nearly killed them. Now, however, they're on an expedition into the wilderness, off to locate a lost dwarfhame and recover some relics that are rumored to lie there.

Which means greenskins, skaven, natural hazards... They're about to really see the Old World with the gloves off for the first time.

MMmmm, this is going to be fun.

 

[C_M2008]

The mechanics and gameplay sound very intriguing, but it sounds like the gameplay is tied very tightly to the warhammer fluff/world. Which is unfortunate as I'm not really a fan, I'd rather homebrew.

So WFRP players I'll put this out to you, how easy is it to take the "warhammer" out of the game and simply make it a dark and gritty fantasy game??

 

[kitsune9]

I'm lucky -- my dwarf is a Slayer. He only wears armor on his arms and legs (pants and what we call Vambraces) because a hat would interfere with his crest and a chest-piece would obscure his tattoos...

The one that worries me is the Sigmarite. I think his Toughness is around 40 now and he'll soon be buying plate armor... That makes him one tough hombre. Fortunately, he can't roll percentiles to save his life.

The wannabe witch-hunter is a pretty tough customer, really, but he has some horrendous luck. The party face -- going into Master Thief these days, after all his underworld contact in Altdorf -- is getting respectable with his crossbow. The Elf Wizard? Yeah, she nearly got killed in an alley once while being 'discouraged' from an investigation. After Toughness, I think she took 7 wounds from a dagger. And at the time, I think she had around 10 wounds total...

--------------------------------

There's one catch to all of this, though... up until now, they've faced nothing more dangerous than a minor demon and some cultists. And *that* nearly killed them. Now, however, they're on an expedition into the wilderness, off to locate a lost dwarfhame and recover some relics that are rumored to lie there.

Which means greenskins, skaven, natural hazards... They're about to really see the Old World with the gloves off for the first time.

MMmmm, this is going to be fun.

See, now that I'm reading these posts about WFRP, I want to run something NOW. I have yet to run a 2e game, but ran a ton of 1e games back in the day.

 

[Obryn]

The mechanics and gameplay sound very intriguing, but it sounds like the gameplay is tied very tightly to the warhammer fluff/world. Which is unfortunate as I'm not really a fan, I'd rather homebrew.

So WFRP players I'll put this out to you, how easy is it to take the "warhammer" out of the game and simply make it a dark and gritty fantasy game??

I know it's been done, but I wouldn't want to try it.

While the basic system can work for everything, if you don't have an expectation of rat catchers, flagellants, zealots, etc., a lot of stuff makes less sense. Also, the whole system of divine magic is very world-centric.

It can be done - it's a solid system - but it wouldn't be as easy as changing the setting for a D&D game.

-O

 

[Emirikol]

BTW, for those of you who want all the free downloads from the old Black Industries site (including all those scenarios), here's the Internet Way-Back-Machine archives. It has all the PDF's, maps, etc.

Enjoy!
Black Industries

Yourwelcome

 

[Emirikol]

So WFRP players I'll put this out to you, how easy is it to take the "warhammer" out of the game and simply make it a dark and gritty fantasy game??

I'd say this would actually be pretty easy and fun to convert. There's nothing that inter-related between the roleplay and the crunch that says that you couldn't do it any other way. I've done it for WFRP and CONAN before (and we've all seen the Lankhmar supplement for D&D right?)

I started in the warhammer world using the D&D 4e system..now that wasn't all that interesting (no 4e for me

Anyways, for conversions:
It runs just like 3E D&D except your damage is reduced by armor and toughness rather than just an AC hit. The SKILLS and TALENTS (i.e. Feats) are just like 3E D&D.

Careers are essentially generic. What world doesn't have rat catchers, priests, wizards, halflings, elves, dwarves, zealots of religion, and whatnot. Although chaos is mentioned, nothing is bound to it. Witch hunters and others could just as well be "evil hunters" instead. Personally, I think NOT having the hedge wizards hunted would be a lot more fun than the puritanical limitations of life in the Empire.

If you don't want a chaos effect on spells, don't have it. It doesn't break the game not to use the charts or "chaos" although I prefer the wildness of magic in this system. It would be fun to homebrew a world just for this!

Spells are broken into generic colleges just like in D&D of old. One color for every in the rainbow.

Priests aren't dependent on their gods and the names could be quickly changed.

GUNS are easy enough to add or remove. Personally, I'd leave them in a homebrew game simply because black powder makes the world darker, evil, and prone to guns jamming at the wrong moment

jh

 

[Sanzuo]

So WFRP players I'll put this out to you, how easy is it to take the "warhammer" out of the game and simply make it a dark and gritty fantasy game??

I don't really see what's wrong with the setting, as you can take the game to other places besides the Empire - but if you wanted to make it a generic gritty fantasy game I don't see the mechanics really getting in the way.

There are a few cereer restrictions based on the universe (such as dwarves and halflings not being able to use magic) and you could simply remove those restrictions if you wanted.

I have a friend who is more or less incapable of gamemastering established settings, he always has to create his own fantasy universe. I could see a more generic setting with the WFRP rules taking place in a nameless savage wilderness somewhere.

...Like a fallout-esque fantasy post-apocolyptic wasteland. Imagine WFRP after chaos defeats the empire.

 

[kitsune9]

The mechanics and gameplay sound very intriguing, but it sounds like the gameplay is tied very tightly to the warhammer fluff/world. Which is unfortunate as I'm not really a fan, I'd rather homebrew.

So WFRP players I'll put this out to you, how easy is it to take the "warhammer" out of the game and simply make it a dark and gritty fantasy game??

If you stick with just the basic rulebook, you're fine--not too much to tweak to make it your own kind of homebrew, but the other supplements tend to get very setting specific in that you'll have more work to do to alter them to suit your tastes.

Altogether, try the setting too! It really is an awesome setting of a dark and grim times.

 

[Rel]

The mechanics and gameplay sound very intriguing, but it sounds like the gameplay is tied very tightly to the warhammer fluff/world. Which is unfortunate as I'm not really a fan, I'd rather homebrew.

So WFRP players I'll put this out to you, how easy is it to take the "warhammer" out of the game and simply make it a dark and gritty fantasy game??

The only WFRP2 game I ever ran was a Pirates of the Caribbean game and it worked completely fine setting the game outside the Old World. The only real tweak I had to make was making guns more prevalent.