I agre with Yepesnopes, a good character sheet and GM screen (especialy the first one) are the best things that fix looking in to the rules. i've played many RPGs over more then 20 years now and never had a problem with the need to look up the rules in the books. The thing, in my opinion, with the cards is that they some times think for the players or the players think that they can't do anything that they don't have a card for. Without cards players have more options becouse they are not restricted to card and use more imagination. I remember my first session in WFRP 3e when all my players asked what can they do if they don't have a card for something? That was the first sign for my that card are not good for all players. Some will think of them as good think becouse  the cards say what they character can do, but for other those will be restriction or limits for characters that show what they heroes can't do.

The thing I think is good in SW EotE is the skill list on characters sheets that tell players how good they are in specific skills. So the GM only tells them which skill to use and how challenging it will be but the effect and what a players whats to do depends only from his choice and his imagination. I never thought of having everything in books as something bad, it only needs a good organisation before sessions.

DevoutBadger - I think you have a good feeleing about the line. I also have a hunch, when looking at the WFRP 3e, that this line is nearing the end. The WFRP 3e is problematic, it become to expansive and I remeber last years sale. If my memory is correct the same thing happened with WFRP 2e, before the end of the line and announcing the 3e there was a big sale when FFG whanted to clear there werehouses of the previous edition. The same is happening here, as I see it. The Christmas sale was a sign for me that the line is not doing so well. I just wonder if FFG will make a new edition? And if they do one will it be a 3.5 e or 4e?

And I totaly agre with You, DevoutBadger, that the new edition will be in book format. I think that the format used in W40K RPGs and SW RPGs is a succesfull one.

Cheers

PS. I also think that the best part of WFRP 3e was the custom dice mechanic. It was wonderful playing the game and seeing that the result not only is a success or failure but also has some side effects.

Yepesnopes said:

Yepesnopes said:

I'm pretty much in agreement with you on the dice being the main and most interesting innovation, although I'm still in doubt over whether or not they are actually needed.

The cards are fine for carrying rules and the tokens are fine for tracking, but I'd rather see a system that reduced the need to check rules and keep track of things in the first place.

That said, taking WFRP3 as it is, what might sell me on the system is a good character sheet app for a tablet, enabling you to check, track and alter details with a touch.

Cheers

Sparrow

I found the character sheet to be the weakest part of the game from the start, otherwise I personally like the cards for character actions and use them for most of the games that I play now (pathfinder, etc.).

No big deal though.  I still find the new SW game to be a little too simplified for my tastes after playing the depths of WFRP3.  Maybe that will change as they add supplements to the game they could bring it back up to the advanced level of WFRP3.

But, for anyone who doesn't like the "cards" why aren't you using the player's guide?

jh

The character sheet for 3e are designed to fit the system as it is and besides not everyone like to play with a tablet.

Emirikol, I remember that Lite version of the game that FFG promised and I tried it - it's unplayable. Really, everyone in my group when he would need to write down all action said it not worth. It takes to much time and you still need to play with cards and tokens but You need to write them down and not place them on table.  Besides there is no chance to make a card for every thing a player or GM wants to do, the imagination  has no limits and cards do.

I agre that a system needs to be played as easy as it can and have a good character sheet. Also the rules have to be so easy to not have to look at them every time. I had a chance to play now SW Bigginers Game and enjoyed it. It was so easy to learn and play. Wow it's so intuitive. Really a nice game.

I think that the cards are not so needed when the rules are written good.

I just wondered if the WFRP would look like the SW or W40k line then how would they divide it? Which  part FFG would fit into which line? There could be a corebook for the border lands of the Empire and fighting agains invasions from beyond the Sigmar lands, for the cities such as enemy within to fight cultists and enemies of Underempire, for players to play outside of the Old World and of course a line to play on the Chaos side as the evil ones.

I'm really waiting inpacient to see an official news about the future of WFRP, any news from FFG would be great to hear. This waiting to know  what will come is terrible. And still keeping my fingers crossed to see an updated verison of the WFRP (3.5 or 4 would be great).

Cheers

PS. One of the biggers mistakes for the WFRP was to fit into the core products anly 3 Faiths and 3 Orders of  Magic. There should be all of them but with fewer spells soif you would want to play, you could play any wizard or any priest. And if you would want to have more blessings/spells you would need an expansion. I really was unpleased when I saw only 3 of each of them.

Yepesnopes said:

So name them. It'll be interesting to see how they compare crunch-wise to WFRP3. 

Why not just mark the pages in the players guide so you don't have to write down your action?  It's what we do in all the other games we play.  Each of our players in Pathfinder have the core book and we reference it.  Nobody would bother to write down the actions in Pathfinder.  What's unplayable about that? It's exactly the same in WFRP3.

I'm not sure what "unplayable" means when it comes do marking pages in the book and writing down the rest (just like every other game).  How many "actions" does a character really have?   A summary sheet and 3-4 actions.  That makes it LESS referencing than Pathfinder and I dont' consider that game to be unplayable even though it has MORE stuff to write down than any WFRP3 game.

So players are supposed to have GM screens?  (I'm arguing this because I think we're making WFRP look more complicated than it is).

bladerunner_35 said:

D&D went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay sour.  4e is solely responsible for the rise of Paizo, WFRP3, and the 2nd big revolution in gaming.

It went from a pseudo-roleplaying game to a completely miniatures-based wargame.  It is the reason that I started playing WFRP2e and the reason that I still play WFRP3e.

Anyways in comparison of mechanics, wfrp3 has fatigue, stress, stance, recharge, and talent "socketing."  All other components are pretty much duplicated by other games.  I play Pathfinder, so here's the additional crap that they have that matches up to to Wfrp3:

Saving throws //  no match up

Spell times per day // WFRP has spell points

Attack times per round (remember when AD&D 1 had 5/2 attacks and 3/2 attacks?)…ah, those were the days trying to remember that when you were handling 42 combatants.

Non-lethal damage

Ability score drain (all those conditions;most have those)

blöd chart to determine AoO's

spiegeln chart to determine combat modifiers ad-nauseum

A friend of mine borrowed my copy of the One Ring, but I had a giant chart to print out for that game as well.

If only FFG hadn't jumped all over Universal Head for his rules summary, that would still be the handiest thing in print.

jh

As a player I really like the dice mechanics AND the action cards. I don't know if it's psychological or what but I find that having my action cards before me is better than having abilities listed on a character sheet. The cards often prompt outside the box thinking and interesting actions, especially with the support cards. No cards would necessitate a multiple-page character sheet where I think skills/talents/actions might get lost in the shuffle, especially in my case where I only play a couple of times a month and sometimes forget what some of them are.

Emirikol said:

Then we can name at least one good thing from D&D 3, 3.5, 4… 

I have heard that there is even a D&D 5? I hope they do a good work, I liked AD&D, I found it a nice upgrade from the old D&D.

Cheers,

Yepes

 I have heard that there is even a D&D 5? I hope they do a good work, I liked AD&D, I found it a nice upgrade from the old D&D.Then we can name at least one good thing from D&D 3, 3.5, 4… 

* I'm currently playtesting 5e D&D (aka D&D 'next').  Its practically exactly the same as Basic D&D from 1981.  It is very simplified and very generic with token attempts at allowing players to better min-max their statistics through choosing the appropriate "background statistical variants."  There's a reason that their best author jumped ship though and I attribute that to his inflexibility and inability to kiss butt to the Hasbro execs.  Thankfully we can say this here because on RPG.net you'd get banned in a heartbeat for not giving subbelt-favors to some kind of D20 deity.

* 4e turned out to be the worst kind of D&D simply because it thought (wrongly) that people would want to pretend that they are MMO computers and that "marking" opponents with so many stickies that you can't even identify the creature, and that having damage per second calculated by the player, and a total cluster f' of required-laptop-computing just to run a stinking pseudo-rpg, that people would jump at the chance to play a WOW-like experience, but without the MMO doing the calculations (GM instead! yippee!), and without artwork and with a sales-tactic generation of "pseudo-fluff."  D&D 4e was overall, disingenuous. It doesn't have a defined world, yet you are pigeon-holed into some kind of D&D-entity-as-fluff approach, but without a roleplaying aspect.  I think I would have loved it wihtout the massive rube-goldberg machine that it became, the fact that it was impossible to house-rule (wihtout having repercussions f'n up the whole system), and that the GMs job was a horrible, horrible, nightmare of accounting for 50-60 simultaneous modifiers just to run a simple kobold encounter.

What did I like about 4e?  It was balanced.  It had "abilities" throughout the full range of levels for all characters, even though they were just empty combat-actions.

*  3.5E D&D  What was good?  Primarily the RPGA producing massive amounts of scenarios and play through the Living greyhawk system that had story, background, and purpose beyond selling the next book at Borders Bookstore.  Thank Khaines Murderous Claws that Paizo picked it up.  Too bad they're limited to the incessent math-heavy game that is still stuck in a dungeon-crawl mode.  The game system had evolved with 3E D&D, but Paizo failed to refine the game.  A character is just a giant spreadsheet without feel or content for any purpose for the giant stacks and stacks of modifers upon modifiers.  More races and classes have not been the answer, so hopefully their book releases will actually enhance the experience.

* Up until 4e we had TWO print publications specifically for D&D…then it all went to the equivalent of an infomercial on QVC.

*AD&D 2e is what we really played the most throughout college.  It was a broken mish-mash of all kinds of stuff that hadn't evolved Feats and a decent skill system yet, but it was blessed, again with tons of content, scenarios, and a large audience (and also the RPGA).   It was a shitty system for those of us who didn't have or know any better.  We were WalMart shoppers who actually thought we were getting a good deal. AD&D2 suffered from the same issue WFRP2 had:  It was watered down content.  No assassins?  Nope.  It might scare someone's mom.  WFRP2 (and 3e moreso) did exactly the same thing leaving 1e WFRP's tradition of being a truly dark and gritty game with truly dark and gritty words on paper..not just alluded to.

* IF 2nd edition WFRP hadn't stolen the idea for Talents from D&D, I think it would have faded into obscurity. Chris Pramas and his gang gathered just enough depth from D&D3e's feats and their own instincts to justify a new edition that didn't have the original harsh, darkness that scares off the unicorns & faeries crowd.  I conjecture that had 2e gained some more depth for character special abilities (hell, they could have pulled it off without cards), I think we wouldn't have 3e in it's current form.  2e simply didn't have the foresight to have any special abilities beyond just another book of spells.  All editions suffer from too much focus on SPELLCASTERS and not enough on the other 98% of careers IMHO.   YOu don't need a mechanic for all this stuff, but you do need more content beyond the supernatural that is still interesting.  Back to Chris Pramas, but he seems to be pulling that off in the Freeport+WFRP2 game that's runnign at a new convention.

Game systems don't typically matter, except if you have players that are too lazy to contribute in a meaningful way, or unless you are buried in stacks and stacks of looking up rules and having to get a masters degree to learn the 800,000 modifiers required to grapple, call-shot, or fight skeletons in a swamp with arrows instead of blunt weapons.

jh

How do you not have card and not have to refference a book when you have characters each with three to nine unique abilities they can perform? Does your group really memorize them all word for word so well that when an odd circumstance comes up you don't need to refference anything? If so bravo.

DevoutBadger said:

Sorry Devout, I am a bit lost in the thread, there are like two or three parallel conversations.

Is this a question for me? and if so, to which game do you refer, where PC have to memorize especial habilities that are not writen down in the character sheet?

Thx

Yepes

This discusion when a littel of topic I think. I thought we were talking about the best and worst part of WFRP 3e? So the thing we players/GMs like in it and don't.  So maybe I will tell what I like in this games  and what is not the best part of it.

I like in WFRP 3e:

•  the dice mechanic (best and strogest part of this edition)
•  the enviroments that have different effect like burning building or ruins or old dirty road
• the range becouse it easy to say something is not that far away and not have to measure the distances
• the round timing , so only one free manouver and one action per character
• the Ranks that depend on EXP points
• the henchmen rules

I don't like in WFRP 3e:

• all time You need cards and tokens
• the game takes to much of a table space and it's not easy to store all components
• the core set has not included all wizard schools of magic and all priest faiths (only 3 of each)
• too much careers that no one plays, really belive me I play WFRP for over 15 years now, with some stops for other titles, and in that time no one in my 4 groups of players never played such careers like servant or scribe and many others. So in my opinion it's too many careers that are not used and not enought choices for players to create a unique characters over time. Players in many cases buy the cards that are the most powerful one and many other are just thrown away.
• the book that don't have all the informations about the Empire so if noone has ever played WFRP and does not know the setting it is hard for him to find himself in it

So what I would like to see is a new or updated edition of the game with good thick books that let's you play without all components. And edition that gives players and the GM with a core set all the tools needed to play and just expands with every supplement. I really enjoyed my first session in SW Bigginers Game and I like what I see, especialy the content, for SW EotE Core Set. I don't know if someone here or on a different forum said that Jay Little when asked about SW RPG said it's and updated and better version of WFRP, or something like that. I think that it is a lot of truth in those words. WFRP 3e is a good game and I enjoyed it but with time it has too many weak parts for me. The weakest are the reprints of parts of the game and how expansive the game becomes becouse of all componets.

In the end I would like to remeber some thing from last year first were the rumours of a new edition of WFRP approching if they are true or not I don't know. The second is the Christmas sale that looks like the one that was made for WFRP 2e before WFRP 3e come. The 3rd is the lack of information about this line from FFG and the feeling that FFG is loosing interest in WFRP 3e becouse it's not saleing that good. Maybe it's really coming the time to say good bay to WFRP 3e and wait for any annoucement of WFRP 3.5 or 4e? I don't know what FFG plans for WFRP but I hope that is all the best.

Cheers and happy gaming