(no subject)
About a week ago my new play group gathered for our first session of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition. I took notes and had some thoughts on the game that I thought may be useful to others, or at least interesting. I should warn you that I've not written many actual play reports, so I might not have the skills down yet, but here's what I've got.
I should also note that this goes into a lot of detail on specific aspects of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as a ruleset, and I may even wax on a little bit about my history with the game series. Dip your toes in at your own peril.
About a month ago I'd gotten my hands on the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I showed it to a couple of friends, Jo (or spring_violet ), Connie, and Brandon. They were all intrigued by what they saw. We talked about it a little and decided that we wanted to start up a campaign and take the game for a spin.
The first session of our new Warhammer Fantasy campaign was dedicated to character creation. While I'm an old hand at roleplaying, this was a brand new game for me as well as everyone else at the table. I wanted to take things slow and steady and make sure that people weren't left confused, including myself.
After everyone came over and we got dinner sorted I opened up the boxed set that WFRP3 comes in and organized all of the pieces and cards on the table. The final state of things after I got all of the cards set into their little piles was a bit daunting to everyone I think. Each individual card was a choice that players could make when creating their characters, and there was probably about 200 cards on the table to look through. I assured everyone that while it looked like a lot now, it would become very easy to handle later and would seriously limit the amount of book flipping we would have to do. We took it in stride and moved on into taking our first tentative steps into the Warhammer Fantasy game.
I began explaining the world of Warhammer to the players. WFRP3 is set in the long-running and popular Warhammer Fantasy world, which has spawned previous iterations of the roleplaying game, a couple of different miniatures combat games, video games, comic books, novels, and a bunch of other stuff. While the game world is truly huge in scope, the designers made what I felt was a very strong choice in limiting the scope a bit, containing the game out-of-the-box to the country of Reikland, a pseudo-Germany, and having only four of the many damned crazy races of the Warhammer world available for play. As a GM I'm thankful for this. While the miniatures game relies on a steady stream of new races to make the game more interesting and competitive, an RPG with ten or fifteen races could simply be overwhelming, or dilute the impact of that race on the setting and undermine the cool situations that they come with.
After taking a couple of minutes to talk with the players about what the setting was like and discussing the various races of Reikland, it was time for the players to decide on races for their character.
(A quick aside: Like my friend Judd (judd_sonofbert ) talked about a while back in his blog, I'm made uncomfortable by the use of the word "race" in RPGs that have enforced racial stereotypes. Here I will call the various different peoples of the Warhammer world "races" because that's what the text calls them, but I do feel that it is a loaded and unfortunate word choice. /aside)
There are four races in the Core Set: the magickal and urbane High Elfs, the proud Humans, the dutiful Dwarfs, and the mysterious Wood Elfs. Connie was the first out of the gate, immediately saying she wanted to play a High Elf, which I described as a bit like Tolkein's elves, just (a little) less hauty and distant. Jo smiled wickedly when I told her about the Wood Elfs and their hatred for High Elfs, but decided on playing Human, as did Brandon.
Next came Careers. I want to take a moment here and describe what Careers are like, as they're the cornerstone of the Warhammer Fantasy character and Warhammer Fantasy has used the Career mechanic for its characters since its first edition. I, like I'm sure many of you, played a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. I was born in the late seventies, so my edition of DnD was 2nd ed. DnD, like the many traditional RPGs that were inspired by it, is built around the "Class" design, which defines your character by the role they take within a party and gives you a tree of power sets that you'll select from over the course of your character's entire life. There are advantages to this design. A Class is generally built around tactical ability, and pursuing a Class means that you have access to powers and skills that make you capable in combat. If your interest isn't in a combat-heavy game though, Classes will feel rigid and lack character. Two different fifteenth level whatevers will likely look exactly the same on the character sheet. Not so Careers.
I find WFRP3's Careers interesting because they are almost the opposite of the Class. As a character, you start in one Career. This can be a mundane thing like a Ratcatcher or the town's Barber. Your Career teaches you skills and gives you access to abilities that are appropriate to that Career. Ratcatchers will be good at sneaking around sewers and stabbing things. Barbers will know how to pull teeth and suture wounds. But when you've decided you're done with your Career, you can just move onto a new one. A Ratcatcher can find religion and become an Initiate. A Barber may impress a Lord and find himself the Lord's Agent. And you can do this all of the time. A PC that's seen six months of regular play in Warhammer will change a lot and will be impacted by those changes in both a mechanical way and in a satisfying informational way on the character sheet.
I also like Careers as a design concept because they give a character a good sense of place within the setting. Careers are jobs in the real world. A character could talk about their career in the game and not sound like a crazy person. They also define a role for your character within that world. Witch Hunters are important because they root out the threat of Chaos and evil magick in the world. Ratcatchers hunt through the sewers of the cities and find the vermin underneath. As a player I may no longer follow the path of my Career, but it's nice to know what my character did before the campaign starts.
Back to the game, then. There are two ways to decide on a PC's first career in WFRP3; a player can either draw three Career cards at random and pick their favourite, or they can simply file through the pile and pick a Career of their choice. Jo went first and she knew exactly what she wanted. Two weeks previous she had flipped through the books and caught something out of the corner of her eye about an order of priests that worshiped Morr, the god of death, and killed the undead in his name. I looked at her and asked her what she wanted to play. She just giggle and I handed her the Career card for the priestly Initiate and moved on to the next players.
Brandon decided to flip through the pile and whittle his selection down to his favourites. He pulled a couple of career cards from the pile and studied each of them. He was between Carriage Driver and Agent as I recall, but after a couple of minutes of indecision he went for the rough and tumble Bounty Hunter.
Connie decided she wanted to try going random. I went through the Career card deck and removed the Careers that she wouldn't have access to as a High Elf. Then I shuffled the deck and she drew three cards. Of those she decided on the Envoy, an Elf sent from the High Elf homeland to act on behalf of her people on matters of politics.
The next step was on more familiar RPG ground as we went over spending character points on character stuff. Characters in WFRP3 are comprised of a couple of components, which are Characteristics (rating in broad abilities like Strength and Willpower), Skills (training in specific areas of knowledge), Talents (rules-bending special abilities that allow your character to be really good at very specific things), and Actions Cards (special maneuvers that you can do with skills that make them more effective).
Characters are given a certain number of points to spend on these components based on their Race, with Humans getting the most. This is where things bogged down a bit. Having the cards to represent both Talents and Actions helped in a way, in that players weren't handing books around the table and could very easily compare different choices to see which one would work better for them. It also hurt a little as there are about 150 Action cards, and about half as many Talent cards to look through.
The players spent their points and bought their Characteristics and Skills, and stacked up their piles of Action and Talent cards. It was during the process of helping the guys figure out which actions to buy that I discovered a really cool aspect of presenting characters' Careers and special abilities as cards: built-in character novelty. There is only one copy of every Career, Action and Talent card in the game which means that, unless your players are sharing cards, only one character can have a given Action or Talent. I never once saw the players arguing over who would get what. Instead, I saw them talk a lot about the choices open to them. They would compare cards together and hand around Actions that they thought looked cool. Jo held up one of her Spell action cards and told the others about how it gave her character a "Fear Rating". The others marveled at that and remarked upon its coolness.
The final steps were largely book-keeping stuff. Determining the number of wounds a character can take, coming up with names, that sort of stuff. The one part that isn't book-keeping is the selection of the Party Card. It's during this step that the players work together and look through a number of cards that define why the Party is together and what they hope to accomplish. Party Cards range from gangs of swashbuckling criminals to a group of virtuous warriors. My group looked through the pile and wound up going for the Servants of Justice. They wanted to fight against an evil threat to their city, and with Jo's character we could all guess that this threat would be undead in nature.
Party Cards are fantastic, and not only because they create instant situation. Each party card gives the entire party a new power that helps them accomplish their goals. My players' Party power lets each player expend some of their character's endurance to do extra damage to the evil things they fight. And each Party card has its own unique and drastically different ability to grant to the characters.
Party cards also give the players the ability to share their character's powers. A player can choose to take one of his character's Talent cards and socket it into the Party sheet instead of his own character sheet, giving everyone in the party access to that Talent. I showed that particular ability to my players as I explained the party card. I picked up one of the player's Talent cards and socketed it into the party sheet and everyone at the table smiled and remarked at the simple coolness of it.
It was around this time that we decided to put a bow on the night and wind down for a couple of minutes. I showed everyone how they could take their character components and put them inside their "character boxes", these little cardboard boxes that were included in the set to keep character stuff in. Everyone seemed to like keeping all of their cards m in their own little boxes. I wrapped everything up by asking a couple of questions of the group and cleaned up the table.
After having about a week to mull the first session over I've got to say that I'm very impressed by what I've seen so far. The presentation of the game really does feel different and novel, and once my players started to learn what parts of the cards meant they quickly stepped up and really took some enjoyment from flipping through the cards.
There are a couple of small faults that I see with the game so far. First, while the text of the game does have an entire chapter dedicated purely to detailing the history of the Warhammer world, it doesn't do the best job of communicating the feel of the setting. I've read my fair share of Warhammer game products in the past and I do have a good working knowledge of what a Warhammer game is like so I doubt that this will effect me, but new players to the game world may have some stumbles along the way. This is made up for by the dice mechanics of the game itself, but I'll wait until next week to go over that.
Also, while most of the choices that a Player will have to make about their character are presented on cards, the playable Races are not, and I really wish they were. I feel it would speed up the process of explaining the races to new players, and would reduce the dreaded "book-passing".
The other fault that I see so far is the lack of character personality. There aren't that many moments in character generation where a player gets to say what his character is like, the best of those being when you select your character's Talents. While I understand that not every player is interested in this sort of stuff, I definitely am, and I feel like the quirky nature of WFRP is only served better by having quirky characters populate its world. This may also be a problem of my own making. I haven't ran a game in a long while and I feel like I may have rushed the players at points, inadvertently blowing past those character defining moments in CharGen. In either case, this is something that I plan on addressing as soon as I can.
Overall, I am very happy with the game so far, and I am really excited to see where things go next.
Speaking of next, my next game post will be in a week or so and will detail the first session of our new Warhammer campaign as well as how the dice mechanics work.
I should also note that this goes into a lot of detail on specific aspects of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as a ruleset, and I may even wax on a little bit about my history with the game series. Dip your toes in at your own peril.
About a month ago I'd gotten my hands on the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I showed it to a couple of friends, Jo (or spring_violet ), Connie, and Brandon. They were all intrigued by what they saw. We talked about it a little and decided that we wanted to start up a campaign and take the game for a spin.
The first session of our new Warhammer Fantasy campaign was dedicated to character creation. While I'm an old hand at roleplaying, this was a brand new game for me as well as everyone else at the table. I wanted to take things slow and steady and make sure that people weren't left confused, including myself.
After everyone came over and we got dinner sorted I opened up the boxed set that WFRP3 comes in and organized all of the pieces and cards on the table. The final state of things after I got all of the cards set into their little piles was a bit daunting to everyone I think. Each individual card was a choice that players could make when creating their characters, and there was probably about 200 cards on the table to look through. I assured everyone that while it looked like a lot now, it would become very easy to handle later and would seriously limit the amount of book flipping we would have to do. We took it in stride and moved on into taking our first tentative steps into the Warhammer Fantasy game.
I began explaining the world of Warhammer to the players. WFRP3 is set in the long-running and popular Warhammer Fantasy world, which has spawned previous iterations of the roleplaying game, a couple of different miniatures combat games, video games, comic books, novels, and a bunch of other stuff. While the game world is truly huge in scope, the designers made what I felt was a very strong choice in limiting the scope a bit, containing the game out-of-the-box to the country of Reikland, a pseudo-Germany, and having only four of the many damned crazy races of the Warhammer world available for play. As a GM I'm thankful for this. While the miniatures game relies on a steady stream of new races to make the game more interesting and competitive, an RPG with ten or fifteen races could simply be overwhelming, or dilute the impact of that race on the setting and undermine the cool situations that they come with.
After taking a couple of minutes to talk with the players about what the setting was like and discussing the various races of Reikland, it was time for the players to decide on races for their character.
(A quick aside: Like my friend Judd (judd_sonofbert ) talked about a while back in his blog, I'm made uncomfortable by the use of the word "race" in RPGs that have enforced racial stereotypes. Here I will call the various different peoples of the Warhammer world "races" because that's what the text calls them, but I do feel that it is a loaded and unfortunate word choice. /aside)
There are four races in the Core Set: the magickal and urbane High Elfs, the proud Humans, the dutiful Dwarfs, and the mysterious Wood Elfs. Connie was the first out of the gate, immediately saying she wanted to play a High Elf, which I described as a bit like Tolkein's elves, just (a little) less hauty and distant. Jo smiled wickedly when I told her about the Wood Elfs and their hatred for High Elfs, but decided on playing Human, as did Brandon.
Next came Careers. I want to take a moment here and describe what Careers are like, as they're the cornerstone of the Warhammer Fantasy character and Warhammer Fantasy has used the Career mechanic for its characters since its first edition. I, like I'm sure many of you, played a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. I was born in the late seventies, so my edition of DnD was 2nd ed. DnD, like the many traditional RPGs that were inspired by it, is built around the "Class" design, which defines your character by the role they take within a party and gives you a tree of power sets that you'll select from over the course of your character's entire life. There are advantages to this design. A Class is generally built around tactical ability, and pursuing a Class means that you have access to powers and skills that make you capable in combat. If your interest isn't in a combat-heavy game though, Classes will feel rigid and lack character. Two different fifteenth level whatevers will likely look exactly the same on the character sheet. Not so Careers.
I find WFRP3's Careers interesting because they are almost the opposite of the Class. As a character, you start in one Career. This can be a mundane thing like a Ratcatcher or the town's Barber. Your Career teaches you skills and gives you access to abilities that are appropriate to that Career. Ratcatchers will be good at sneaking around sewers and stabbing things. Barbers will know how to pull teeth and suture wounds. But when you've decided you're done with your Career, you can just move onto a new one. A Ratcatcher can find religion and become an Initiate. A Barber may impress a Lord and find himself the Lord's Agent. And you can do this all of the time. A PC that's seen six months of regular play in Warhammer will change a lot and will be impacted by those changes in both a mechanical way and in a satisfying informational way on the character sheet.
I also like Careers as a design concept because they give a character a good sense of place within the setting. Careers are jobs in the real world. A character could talk about their career in the game and not sound like a crazy person. They also define a role for your character within that world. Witch Hunters are important because they root out the threat of Chaos and evil magick in the world. Ratcatchers hunt through the sewers of the cities and find the vermin underneath. As a player I may no longer follow the path of my Career, but it's nice to know what my character did before the campaign starts.
Back to the game, then. There are two ways to decide on a PC's first career in WFRP3; a player can either draw three Career cards at random and pick their favourite, or they can simply file through the pile and pick a Career of their choice. Jo went first and she knew exactly what she wanted. Two weeks previous she had flipped through the books and caught something out of the corner of her eye about an order of priests that worshiped Morr, the god of death, and killed the undead in his name. I looked at her and asked her what she wanted to play. She just giggle and I handed her the Career card for the priestly Initiate and moved on to the next players.
Brandon decided to flip through the pile and whittle his selection down to his favourites. He pulled a couple of career cards from the pile and studied each of them. He was between Carriage Driver and Agent as I recall, but after a couple of minutes of indecision he went for the rough and tumble Bounty Hunter.
Connie decided she wanted to try going random. I went through the Career card deck and removed the Careers that she wouldn't have access to as a High Elf. Then I shuffled the deck and she drew three cards. Of those she decided on the Envoy, an Elf sent from the High Elf homeland to act on behalf of her people on matters of politics.
The next step was on more familiar RPG ground as we went over spending character points on character stuff. Characters in WFRP3 are comprised of a couple of components, which are Characteristics (rating in broad abilities like Strength and Willpower), Skills (training in specific areas of knowledge), Talents (rules-bending special abilities that allow your character to be really good at very specific things), and Actions Cards (special maneuvers that you can do with skills that make them more effective).
Characters are given a certain number of points to spend on these components based on their Race, with Humans getting the most. This is where things bogged down a bit. Having the cards to represent both Talents and Actions helped in a way, in that players weren't handing books around the table and could very easily compare different choices to see which one would work better for them. It also hurt a little as there are about 150 Action cards, and about half as many Talent cards to look through.
The players spent their points and bought their Characteristics and Skills, and stacked up their piles of Action and Talent cards. It was during the process of helping the guys figure out which actions to buy that I discovered a really cool aspect of presenting characters' Careers and special abilities as cards: built-in character novelty. There is only one copy of every Career, Action and Talent card in the game which means that, unless your players are sharing cards, only one character can have a given Action or Talent. I never once saw the players arguing over who would get what. Instead, I saw them talk a lot about the choices open to them. They would compare cards together and hand around Actions that they thought looked cool. Jo held up one of her Spell action cards and told the others about how it gave her character a "Fear Rating". The others marveled at that and remarked upon its coolness.
The final steps were largely book-keeping stuff. Determining the number of wounds a character can take, coming up with names, that sort of stuff. The one part that isn't book-keeping is the selection of the Party Card. It's during this step that the players work together and look through a number of cards that define why the Party is together and what they hope to accomplish. Party Cards range from gangs of swashbuckling criminals to a group of virtuous warriors. My group looked through the pile and wound up going for the Servants of Justice. They wanted to fight against an evil threat to their city, and with Jo's character we could all guess that this threat would be undead in nature.
Party Cards are fantastic, and not only because they create instant situation. Each party card gives the entire party a new power that helps them accomplish their goals. My players' Party power lets each player expend some of their character's endurance to do extra damage to the evil things they fight. And each Party card has its own unique and drastically different ability to grant to the characters.
Party cards also give the players the ability to share their character's powers. A player can choose to take one of his character's Talent cards and socket it into the Party sheet instead of his own character sheet, giving everyone in the party access to that Talent. I showed that particular ability to my players as I explained the party card. I picked up one of the player's Talent cards and socketed it into the party sheet and everyone at the table smiled and remarked at the simple coolness of it.
It was around this time that we decided to put a bow on the night and wind down for a couple of minutes. I showed everyone how they could take their character components and put them inside their "character boxes", these little cardboard boxes that were included in the set to keep character stuff in. Everyone seemed to like keeping all of their cards m in their own little boxes. I wrapped everything up by asking a couple of questions of the group and cleaned up the table.
After having about a week to mull the first session over I've got to say that I'm very impressed by what I've seen so far. The presentation of the game really does feel different and novel, and once my players started to learn what parts of the cards meant they quickly stepped up and really took some enjoyment from flipping through the cards.
There are a couple of small faults that I see with the game so far. First, while the text of the game does have an entire chapter dedicated purely to detailing the history of the Warhammer world, it doesn't do the best job of communicating the feel of the setting. I've read my fair share of Warhammer game products in the past and I do have a good working knowledge of what a Warhammer game is like so I doubt that this will effect me, but new players to the game world may have some stumbles along the way. This is made up for by the dice mechanics of the game itself, but I'll wait until next week to go over that.
Also, while most of the choices that a Player will have to make about their character are presented on cards, the playable Races are not, and I really wish they were. I feel it would speed up the process of explaining the races to new players, and would reduce the dreaded "book-passing".
The other fault that I see so far is the lack of character personality. There aren't that many moments in character generation where a player gets to say what his character is like, the best of those being when you select your character's Talents. While I understand that not every player is interested in this sort of stuff, I definitely am, and I feel like the quirky nature of WFRP is only served better by having quirky characters populate its world. This may also be a problem of my own making. I haven't ran a game in a long while and I feel like I may have rushed the players at points, inadvertently blowing past those character defining moments in CharGen. In either case, this is something that I plan on addressing as soon as I can.
Overall, I am very happy with the game so far, and I am really excited to see where things go next.
Speaking of next, my next game post will be in a week or so and will detail the first session of our new Warhammer campaign as well as how the dice mechanics work.