Frostyfrog said:

I agree. People are complaining about "$100!!!!", but think about what you get.

4 (FOUR) full rulebooks, which I think are mentioned as being hardback, which suggests they are going to be fairly hefty.

30-40 dice - Who doesn't love more dice? You can never have too many dice!

Cards and stuff with rules on - Awesome! Means I don't have to flick through the rulebooks (of which there are 4) every 5-10 minutes to find one specific rule.

Sounds like a great game to me! I'm with you and Dave on this one, I'm looking forward to it.

MILLANDSON said:

Maybe if you could buy it in components it would be ok, but having to spend it all in one go is  a bit much. 30-40 custom dice as they so regularly put it means they are useless in anything else.

You'll notice my complaints are about atmosphere and 'level'. WFRP didn't have to stoop to D&D's level to be a good game.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Where have you read that it's stooping to DnD's level? I've never seen WotC come out with something as polished and unique as the 3rd edition looks.

MILLANDSON said:

I meant how the game was pitched. D&D is a game of high magic with +10 swords of killing. WFRP is known for it's distinctive ratcatcher.

2nd ed's blurb on the back referred to PCs thusly:

"In Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay you are unlikely heroes in a grim world of perilous adventure. You venture into the dark corners of the Empire and deal with the threats that others cannot or will not face. You'll probably die alone in some festering hellhole, but maybe, just maybe, you'll survive foul mutants, horrible diseases, insidious plots, and sanity blasting rituals to reap Fate's rewards."

Whilst 3rd ed decided to say:

"As a hero, you will take up weapon, spell, or prayer and do your best to combat the might of enemies terrifying to behold."
 

That seems like a pretty clear shift to me. And if we are supposed to be reading more into the description than is there, well it's a bad description.

I'm not passing final judgement until Gencon reveals actual rules and gameplay. I'm hoping some people will get a chance to play it and give a review.

But if the game is just a normal RPG with extra bells and whistles rather than how it's been described, FFG's first taste marketiing is pretty poor. It's not in their interests to generate negativity, so you'd think their advertisement and descriptions would focus on how atmospheric and true to warhammer and the warhammer fantasy roleplay world it is. Instead they spend ages describing how innovative it  is with its custom dice and unique methods of story telling. So either the game is focused on the areas they push in their description or their advertising people have done a poor job.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Somebody, please, make a video record of this!

MILLANDSON said:

Frankly, D&D 4e is pretty polished. The books certainly look pretty, but most gamers I know dismiss this as just style over substance. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, but polished and pretty doesn't equal good gameplay (they're not mutually exclusive either, just to be clear). As for unique, that could go either way. 

DagobahDave said:

So, basically you are saying that you had to wait 20 years to play the game you wanted?

I mean you are either the most persistent person in the world or the graphic strength of the v1 cover was really astounding ;)

Ok, I tease a little bit but if we try our hand (or even better eyes) on the reading the image and do the comparative analysis of the v1 cover and v3 cover I think that we would deduce that they are radically different and are not conveying the same message.

Let’s take a look:

V1 cover has a standard adventuring party facing off some orcs in what seems as typical post-Tolkien fantasy BUT it seems a little bit out of joint. It is a little pulpy (note the joy on the face of the warrior skewering that big ball and chain wielding ogre or sheer psycho-strain look on the dwarf braining that poor orc), a little bit S & S (wizard is obviously hiding and readying the spell), a little bit dirty (rats and bats in the background), a little bit Leiberian (what is that background? Evil temple? Long abandoned? Dusty tomb?). So in the V1 cover we have a group of adventurers (who look like a group of ne’er-do-wells that are going to ‘adventure’ in order to alleviate their financial woes) who have stumbled into the ruined Temple (abandoned Dwarven City, whatever…) and there by ill chance ran into Orc chieftain and his cohorts.

V3? Priest in heavy plate ducking it out with similarly heavily armored Chaos warrior, standing amidst conflagration caused by obviously pyromaniac wizard slaughtering some invisible foes? It seems that they are in the middle of the almost super-heroic slugfest. Almost like something more out of the 40k then its fantasy cousin.

So instead of the heroes by chance in dark fantasy setting, we get (on the cover, we don’t know anything about the contents as yet) super-heroes on some epic battlefield fighting rampaging hordes of armored Chaos warriors.

Do we wait another 20 years to play that game?
 

For some reason the v1 cover always made me think of Trollslayer by William King

Also, I don't think trying to objectively analyse art(work) is the best way of making a point

I am scared. I am usualy overenthousiastic about anything new, but this is just. Wrong. And I hear chainswords slowly buzzing, if this "new edition style" will move towards the 40k roleplay...

"More than 300 cards keep you in the game, no need to look up skills or abilities"

You will however need to be able to sort through the cards to find the skill or ability that your looking up, is this not worse than flicking to the correct chapter in a book?

MILLANDSON said:

We're complaining about the $100 price tag because people who don't give a damn about WFRP are unlikely to risk purchasing a game they may or may not enjoy, especially with the economy being what it is.  Even current fans are unable to take a peek before buying because the product is being distributed in a boxed set, which means shrink wrap.  It's to no one's benefit for this game to fail....

It's also worth mentioning that we have no idea who large those four books are going to be.  If anything, the description given makes it sound as if they will have a fairly narrow focus, which means a small page count.  Furthermore, we should keep in mind that Black Industries published all of their books in hardback early on, even the small ones.  Frankly, I don't think there's a chance in hell the contents of that box will contain four full-sized rulebooks, but we'll see.

I imagine that the 300 includes duplicates and that each character will have a "hand" of probably no more than 10.

If that isn't the case, then round these parts it's called "Salesman BS"

Lupinorc said:

I tend to disagree. We can reasonably speak and debate about an artwork and its either implicit or explicit meaning(s). Note that this is not implying a moral judgment (good or bad) but just to understand creative process and its application in a given context.

If we can speak only in terms of 'I like' or 'I don't like' about an art we could be also incapable to think about ourselves and our society or in other words why we like or don't like something. Thus culture studies and art history :)

Just looking at these two pictures can tell us a lot about gaming in 1980s and gaming in 2000s.

A gigantic, humongous disappointment for me personally. I am not referring to the use of 'hero' in connection with WFRP. I mean the new game is totally about merchandising and productisation (is that a word in English?), not to mention the feared 'dumbing down'. I mean look at it, the basic set costs 100 dollars, apparently you can buy expansion sets to cater for more players, you need 'special' dice which you can't get anywhere else (and which you can't use for anything else). The basic set appears to be full of these new shiny things (aka 'crap') that FFG excels at in their board games, cards, counters and other gimmicks. And you don't need to learn the game, it's all on templates and cards! You don't even have know numbers, because the dice use nice little symbols. It's all gonna be so easy to learn, fast-paced and quick, and well... so dumbed down.

Ok, we don't know a lot about at this stage, and the game might actually be very good at what it sets out to do, but that is not what I want from WFRP. But wait, FFG doesn't give a toss about their loyal and old customers, because they want  the 'new' customer, who's well, not that interested in roleplaying to begin with. I guess it makes sense to abandon the old customers (a known quantity), and try to reach the new (unknown) ones? Because, hey WOC is doing it so they must be out there. It's like rats leaving the sinking ship.

Cat that Walked by Himself said:

Cat that Walked by Himself said:

No, looking at these two pictures can tell us a lot about fantasy artwork in the 1980s and fantasy artwork in the 2000s.

Or, looking at these two pictures we can infer a lot about gaming in the 1980s and gaming in the 2000s.

DagobahDave said that the two pieces of cover art "evoked the same sense of adventure" in him. An incredibly subjective statement which by it's nature cannot be incorrect.

You appeared to try to tell him he was incorrect by describing the contents of both pieces, during which description you made a couple of subjective assumptions, for example "who look like a group of ne’er-do-wells that are going to ‘adventure’ in order to alleviate their financial woes" and "pyromaniac wizard slaughtering some invisible foes? It seems that they are in the middle of the almost super-heroic slugfest"

Granted the second quote is probably the most likely interpretation of that particular piece, but if someone else thought otherwise who are we to tell them they are wrong