So after digesting the rules and having a few debates about some interpretations here is a run down of the main changes with 5e. As I mentioned the watchword is simplify without losing what makes WFRP special.
Advantage/disadvantage
Not to be confused with 4e combat Advantage. This is new to 5e though it already existed hidden within a lot of talents like Attractive. If you have advantage on a roll you get to swap the tens and units on the dice if it benefits you. Disadvantage means you have to swap if it’s worse. Much easier mechanic to remember instead of the multitude of varying bonuses and used throughout the edition.
Metacurrency
So one of the gripes with 4e was that having four meta currencies to track was too confusing. Now this has just been reduced to Fate and Fortune. Fate saves you from death, mutation, a crippling blow or allows you to pick the number on an important roll but once it’s gone it’s gone. Fortune lets you remove conditions, reroll a dice, or give yourself advantage on a roll in advance and refreshes at the start of the adventure (or agreed time period). Fortune is also no longer linked to Fate so there is no doom spiral where spending Fate to avoid death meant you subsequently got less rerolls making death more likely. A win in my book.
Advancement
Another gripe was that developing was too granular, 1 percentage point at a time. Now an ‘advance’ increases a skill or ability score by +5 and costs the proportionate amount. This stops some gaming of the system to gain more crits and round numbers. Point by point is still there as a variant option for those that want it but I think this is a good change. It’s the difference between deciding how to spend 13 points at character creation instead of 64 points.
Character creation
Each species now gets an advance (+5) in five species defined skills - much simpler. Fortune and Fate is also determined by species with each getting baseline 3 Fortune. Halflings are no longer small. Size really does matter in WFRP and small was punishing in 4e. lastly instead of getting an XP bonus for accepting random results you now get a bonus Fate point if you take the random results which is nice.
Careers
Careers now all get 10 skills at tier 1 allowing for a bit more variety in characters. There are some tweaks such as wizards apprentices not getting WS as a class ability. Though most of these are minor. The most exciting thing is the way career progression now works. Instead of having to take advances in every career skill and ability score you now get a progression track. Every time you buy a career advance or a talent, or acquire a trapping for the next tier then you get a tick. 10 ticks and you complete tier 1. A further 12 and you complete tier 2 and 14 to complete tier 3. I love how this frees up career progression to fit your character. Your knight might get a destrier, lance and plate armour (3 ticks), a couple of talents (2 ticks), improve their Strength twice (2 ticks) and improve three skills (3 ticks) and that would be enough to level up your tier 2.
Skills
These have been simplified in their descriptions reducing the size of the skill chapter dramatically but then a separate chapter on running the game has been added which gives examples of the common adventuring activities and how the skills would be used for these. It’s neat and makes running the game much easier.
A structural change is that difficulty and combat modifiers no longer change the target number for a skill test. Instead they grant a modifier to the SL so a +10 to hit now becomes a +1 SL. Those +SLs can also change a failure into a success in most cases. This might seem like a small thing but it has a big impact on the game because several abilities and results key off whether you roll under your target number. Crits for instance.
Talents
This is another the big structural change for WFRP and has a massive impact. Test line bonuses are gone and now talents now just do a specific thing. Taking the same talent several times used to be a way of improving a roll without investing in the skill and was used for everything from spell casting to bare knuckle fighting. It was also responsible for some of the biggest abuses in the game and was quite complicated to track. That’s all gone now. So dirty fighting instead of improving brawling checks substantially for every rank you take, now lets you swap an unarmed attack damage for a ‘low blow’ crit result. You only take it once. This is probably the single best thing they have done to simplify the system and make it more accessible - at the cost of breaking the existing meta around character builds. Most of the disagreement seems to have come from what this has done to spell casting.
Combat Advantage vs Momentum
The other big gripe was the challenge of tracking advantage (combat advantage not the dice swapping mechanic mentioned above) where successes snowballed to cumulative bonuses until you took damage or failed. This is gone and now we have Momentum. A much simpler binary state gained when you succeed in a melee roll (and only melee) you can also gain momentum when you charge and through talents and some spells. You still lose it if you take damage but while you have it you gain advantage on attacks (reverse the dice). You can also spend it to get off hand attacks and do various other tricks.
Critical Hits
Wait for it… No more critical deflection. Ouch. This has really split the option on the discord. I like it. Armour used to make random crits irrelevant and not having it was catastrophic. Now they have reduced both the likelihood of crits because of the changes to skill tests. They have also reduced the lethality of the crit tables and expanded the range above 100. With the worst results reserved for when you lose all your wounds. I think this will mitigate the change but there are lots of folks thinking this will make melee combat very very dangerous.
Spell casting
As mentioned, in 4e talents became a crutch for spell casting where multiple ranks of Instinctive Diction and Perfect Pitch talents were used to Jerry rig spell casting to make Channelling unnecessary. With the removal of Test Line Bonuses that is all gone and wizards now need to channel in order to cast more powerful spells. I personally like this. Channelling is easier though still comes with risk and it takes time. The upside is that channelled power can now be used to overcast a spell where before it couldn’t. I think it’s a good change but controversial. Some of the talents that made spell casting more reliable have also been nerfed. Again not a bad thing in a lot of people’s opinion.
Equipment
This contains lots of tweaks. Impact is gone. Healing potions are gone. Bandages are now needed to stop an open wound becoming infected. Fast weapons no longer rule the roost. Armour can now be stacked - leather - chain - plate for a total of 5 AP just like in 1e. Though the weight requirement for that is substantial. It also cost a lot more. Some things to learn but nothing to substantial to see here.
Monsters
All in all these have been boosted so that CRB monsters are a reasonable specimen of their kind rather. Pret a porter. A range of templates have also been added to represent elites, spellcasters etc. nice touch.
Again traits have been tinkered with but a significant change is that the Small size is gone. It goes Average and then Tiny. Massive creatures also do a little less damage it’s an extra Strength bonus or 2x strength bonus damage instead of tripling the overall number. Which is good. It’s not quite so punishing to defend against monstrous sized creatures.
There are lots more smaller changes but I’m not going to list every talent and monster trait. Overall I think they’ve done a great job. If anyone has any questions I’d be to answer them. Also I’d be really interested if those that considered WFRP but were put off by the complexity find any of the changes useful?
