Playtest Review: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 3rd edition
The Warhammer fantasy game world has always been a very popular one, and some of the old campaigns for it (Enemy Within, especially) have a near-legendary status. The second edition of the game, published (mostly) by the Black Library imprint, was very popular and the whole game line consists of a lot of books. It’s always been a fun setting, as far as I know, but it has always also had a very “retro” game mechanic that hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s been serviceable by most accounts, but nothing all that fantastic.
So, when Fantasy Flight Games got the Warhammer license and announced that they are working on a new edition, the Internet rumor mill started buzzing again. The buzz intensified when some details became clear: it would (gasp!) use a dice pool system, would (gasp!) include some mechanics in card form, etc etc. Many of the initial fears were along the lines: “it’s a board game, not a roleplaying game!”. These complaints intensified when it became clear that the release was a gigantic boxed set, to the tune of a $100 retail price.
So now Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition is here. What is it? How does it play? I’ll try to answer some of that, but I do have one disclaimer: I’ve never played either 1st or 2nd edition of the game. I’m halfway familiar with some of the material, but really… I’m a relative newbie to the Warhammer world. I’ll inspect the game on its own merits, not “compared to 2nd edition sourcebook N”.
I’ll start with “what is it?”. First off, it’s a real roleplaying game. It’s in no form or fashion a board game. It uses some mechanics from board games (and card games) to keep track of things, but the game itself is a pure tabletop rpg. The box contains all you need for a GM + 3 players; only one person in the play group actually needs to buy this, assuming a group of 4 people.
The box is big, and contains 4 books (total a bit under 300 pages) and piles upon piles of different counters, cards, sheets and… stuff. It’s all a bit overwhelming at first, but there is a method to the madness. Fun fact: the page count of the books alone is actually higher than the 2nd edition corebook – and you get a ton of stuff in addition to the books. One book contains the core rules, one is a GM sourcebook, one is detail for playing priests, and the last one is about playing mages. All in all, the books are nicely laid out, and most things are clear enough. However, some of the rules are spread out among multiple books, making some rule details a bit hard to figure out. It’s by no means the worst I’ve seem (compared to Burning Wheel this is a cakewalk), but still… the books could have been a bit better organized, in an ideal world. I do have to give kudos to the GM section; it’s excellent, and contains lots of “indie” stuff like “say yes”, emphasis on a three-act structure, and lots of nice general advice.
In general, this game has taken a lot of cues from “indie” games. I can see bits and pieces of Burning Wheel, Spirit of the Century and other games in here. The design is quite unconventional, and in most places extremely innovative. It’s not without its problems (I’ll get to those later), but in general: this is the most innovative roleplaying design to come from a major publisher for a long time. Not everyone will like it, but I do think that most people who are interested in rpgs should take a look at it. There are lots of cool ideas in here.
To give an exact description of the mechanics would take more space than I want to spend here, so I’ll give a “nutshell” summary.
You still have a traditional “character” sheet, but it’s enhanced with numerous cards. First off, you get a large-format card detailing your current profession. This contains main info about the career. You also get a smaller career card, with the career special ability. This is a bit kludgy imho, that stuff should have been on the main career card… I think they just ran out of space on the main card, here. Anyway, in addition to those you get a bunch of abilities which you attach to your career card into dedicated “slots”. Some of these may be swapped in and out during play. Last off, you get a bunch of Action cards, which represent your normal actions.
Traditionally, this is stuff that would have been represented by written lines on a character sheet. Here they are pre-printed cards. The advantage is that it vastly reduces the need for book lookup during play, since the cards contain much of the mechanics. This is good. It also allows for visual representations of when the action (or whatever) can be used again, via “recharge tokens” placed on the cards.
Then there is the dice pool, which is very cool. It consists of a bunch of custom dice, with symbols on them. The dice have different numbers of faces… some are d6, some d8, etc. You collect a “pool” of them, based on various factors: you base attribute for a skill gives you blue dice, skill training adds yellow “expert” dice, your “stance” (see below) modifies some of your blue dice to green/red, the difficulty of the action adds purple “challenge” dice, and lastly you may get white “fortune” dice and black “misfortune” dice. Once you have your pool you roll it, and the result gives you a “multidimensional” result: in addition to saying whether you succeed or fail, it also provides good or bad side effects which are not tied to success. So you might succeed, but get a bad side-effect. Or vice versa.
All that may sound complicated, but it’s actually quite quick to learn and works really nicely. Good job there, FFG.
There are lots of details I could mention, but I’ll only note two specific innovative extra things here.
First, the party sheet. This is the first rpg that I’ve run into which details the group of player characters as a separate entity (in addition to the PCs). So after the players create their characters, they need to decide what kind of party they are. Are they Intrepid Explorers? Or a Gang of Thugs? Or Brash Young Fools? In addition to providing some mechanical effects, the party sheet also serves to remind the players of that important thing: “why are we together in the first place?”. It’s a nice idea.
Secondly, stances. Each character gets a “stance meter”, which depends on his/her career and other things. This consists of a neutral middle point, and a number of “conservative” and “reckless” spaces on either side. In “encounter mode” (the mode you use to resolve most things), characters decide their current stance on that meter. That setting has an effect on how all their actions resolve; doing stuff “recklessly” nets potentially higher benefits, but also runs higher risks. It’s a very nice mechanic, and a clear evolution from many “indie” game ideas.
Ok. Up to now I’ve talked about how the game looks and reads. Based on just those, my impression was very favorable: the production values were excellent (as usual for FFG productions), the mechanics contained a ton of innovative bits, and the thing was still a traditional rpg at the core.
I did have a few issues:
The price is high. Sure, you get a lot for your $100, and the box contains enough for a GM + 3 players – the equivalent set in D&D 4th edition would actually cost you more. Still, it’s a lot of money. I personally think it’s worth the price, though (and you can get it for a lot less than that $100 via Amazon, for example).
As noted, the organization of the rulebooks could be a bit clearer. In addition, there are mistakes and omissions here and there, you need the FAQ document to figure some things out. It’s not horrible, just in the “could be better” department. Also, there is no index.. but FFG actually provides an online ”living index” instead, which is a nice idea and might prove better than a normal index in the long run.
After reading the thing, I was a bit concerned about the amount of table space this thing would probably take, and the amount of fiddly bits (cards, counters, etc) you had to keep track of.
There are only a limited number of races, careers, etc available here. I don’t find this to be much of a problem, the design here makes it easy to expand things as the game develops. It does feature less initial choice in those matters than earlier editions; to me that’s no big deal, but it of course affects the price-vs-value proposition for some people.
Luckily enough, my housemates were all home the next weekend after I got this, so I recruited them as victims for a quick playtest. One had never played any sort of roleplaying game before, one had run some 2nd edition Warhammer, and one some 1st edition… so a nice mix of people there. I decided to run the “Eye for an Eye” demo scenario included with the box.
Character creation went fairly smoothly, though at that point there was quite a bit of “pass me the book” going on… some printouts of relevant tables etc might have helped. The players settled on a priest of Shallaya, an Agent and a Mercenary – forming a gang of Brash Young Fools. After a brief into, off they went into the wilderness.
Things started off with a combat encounter, which ended up taking the bulk of the session. It almost ended with a Total Party Kill also; I should have had the Beastmen break morale earlier than they did, but since I wasn’t familiar with the system I didn’t realize the problems fast enough. The PC group had only one really functional combat character, and against a horde of beastmen.. well, while the Mercenary could hold his own for quite a while, it was a losing battle. In the end, one of the characters would have died if we went by the rules, but I decided to fudge it and “just” leave him critically wounded.
All in all, the combat mechanics seemed ok. Needs a bit of practice to get it to run smoothly, and that one fight went on a bit too long due to the PCs being a bit underpowered – but in general, the system seemed to work nicely. Players reported that having the combat powers right in from of them on cards helped a lot, both with book-keeping and with figuring out capabilities in general.
After that we got to the “investigation” section at a hunting lodge. Things proceeded pretty nicely, though things were a bit hampered by only one of the characters being in mobile shape… and here I ran into the first real rule problem: the rules give no help for deciding how fast a priest can heal someone outside of combat. I decided that the others could get back to decent health pretty fast to keep things moving, but… the rules failed here.
After some stalking around, I decided to call the game session a day – character creation and that one combat had taken a lot of time, and it was getting late. We may continue that scenario later, but for now that’s where we are: halfway in the demo scenario.
So, my opinion of the game after some (quick) playtesting?
The basic mechanics worked pretty much as well as I had hoped. The dice pool thing rocks.
I’m still undecided on when and if to use the “Rally Phase” mechanic.
The “progress tracker” is a nice general mechanics, but the books give way too little actual examples of how to use it. As it, it has promise but needs more game support in order to be really useful.
Despite my own hopes, the game doesn’t really have a “social combat” mechanic. It has something in that direction, but it’s pretty rough and simplified. Of course, due to the expandable card-based design, this might change in the future. I’m sure something cool could be built on top of the Progress Tracker.
Yes, it takes a lot of table space, but nothing impossible. The abstract combat movement mechanics means you don’t need a grid or miniatures, so things balance out. Might be a problem with a larger play group and a small table, though – you need decent table space for this thing.
In the future, I hope they provide NPC/monster stats as cards, also. Here I had to keep a book open for that stuff, which was a bit cumbersome.
At the moment, the rules have a big gaping hole (or at the least, a massive source of confusion). I’ve talked about this a lot of rpg.net and FFG’s own forums, but for now there is no official answer, you must do some houseruling in order to play this game. The problem is this: the game has Encounter Mode, and Story Mode. Action cards make sense in Encounter Mode, but stop making sense outside it. Nowhere in the rules does it say exactly when to use which mode, and how to handle Actions outside Encounter mode. As priest healing “spells” are Actions too, it results in stuff like zero information on how fast divine healing (outside combat) is. Is it instant (one interpretation of the rules)? Does it take days (another interpretation)? Nobody knows, and there is no official answer yet. Though…
…ok. I won’t go into length on this, but in a nutshell here is my current interpretation: you play most of the game in Encounter Mode. You only use Story Mode for “scene switch” narrations, etc. The important thing is this: the amount of time a “turn” takes in Encounter Mode is highly flexible. During combat it might be some seconds or tens of seconds. Outside of that, it may be minutes, hours or even days. Depends on the context. With this framework, you can sort of make the game work outside “combat-time” mode also, though you must fudge things a bit (allow multiple actions during “turn” even though the rules don’t strictly allow that, etc). The problem is that this interpretation depends completely on GM fiat, and also results in some corner-case problems – but it results in less problems than other interpretations to date. To my mind, at least.
So… be prepared for some house-ruling. At the moment, this is a somewhat weird game… it goes from “exact rules with exact results” to “no rules whatsoever, total GM fiat” with no warning whatsoever. While the nice and visual layout of the game might make it good for newbie GMs, the fact that the rules contain some holes at the moment make it less than ideal for that. It’s nothing that a good GM (even a newbie) can’t deal with, but… you have been warned.
In sum: this is a very good new incarnation of Warhammer Fantasy, with lots of (honestly) innovative bits and lots of promise. It’s a bit unpolished at the moment in places, but I have hopes that FFG and/or the player community can slowly fill in the missing bits. Despite the small problems, I’ll highly recommend this one. It’s a breath of fresh air to an old world, in many respects.
2 comments »
-
By Janka about 3 hours later:
-
By Orava about 3 hours later:
Yeah, good catch… that’s probably the reason the career powers are on separate cards.
The priest healing thing sort of makes sense like you said: the gods only give quick aid in an emergency, and stuff like that. There are various house rule suggestions floating about, and I’m sure FFG will give us something official at some point too. The bigger problem is the fact that the usage frequency of Actions outside a fast-turn Encounter phases is not discussed at all in the rules. There is mention that turns may take a (very) variable amount of time… but what that time is is left totally up to GM decision. Ok in some cases, less so in others.
It’s not a game-breaker, just a rules omission that one needs to take into account at the moment.
“You also get a smaller career card, with the career special ability. This is a bit kludgy imho, that stuff should have been on the main career card…” Some of the special abilities are action-type of “exhaust this card to…” or “once in a scene…” etc. I think they are on separate cards so you can flip the card over to note you’ve used the ability already.
The priest healing thing is a pain. It needs some fudging about how gods only interfere in an emergency or something like that to make sense that in combat healing always works fast, and outside of it it doesn’t, and yes, it would be nice if this was in the official rules.