#wfrpg

I built my first WFRPG 4e character yesterday. This did come with some nasty surprises, at least if you ask me. And of course it’s all about expectations.

I already rolled a WFRPG 2e character once and there are strong similarities, so I never considered. There’s such a thing as not paying proper attention when you get what you want right away...

In 4e you can earn somewhere around 100XP in character creation by rolling randomly some things you can actually chose. I can personally say that it at first feels like you somehow got away with something or just earned a free boon. But then realization dawns...

He huffed and he puffed...

Naturally, this is all about expectations. I personally expected a bit of “Rule of Cool” stuff and that the careers are mostly for color. I didn’t notice until I had done it that “Riverfolk” is indeed intended to be my class. It’s not like you pick origin/background and your adventuring profession separately. Your class & career are interwoven and determine what you can “cheaply” grow in. Coming from many other games I didn’t expect that was it already. Backgrounds are minor in D&D, so are occupations in DCC. I thought you would pick some sort of adventuring profession over it. Games that profess having WFRPG in their DNA like Shadow of the Demon Lord have strong classes you pick as well.

Color me surprised then that “Riverfolk” and “Huffer” are actually my class and my career. I re-rolled my stats and re-rolled my career choices (I managed to roll “Townfolk” twice...) and ended up with 45 XP with no idea if that was much or little. I kind of was waiting for something else. And then character creation was over. And then more realizations came...

You see, I actually envisioned building my character into a tank. And as it is with expectations, unfulfilled expectations build frustration and disappointment. I had actually fun building the character until I realized that there was no more to come. I think it’s a well-rounded “level 0″, much more interesting than for example what you get in SotDL by far. But now I had to somehow get from this level 0 to my intended end result and here the problems started to mount...

It took me a while to understand how 4e handles opposed rolls, but after I did I have to say they improved combat a lot, at least that’s my initial impression.

I played only shortly WFRPG 2e before that in a oneshot but the difference was already striking. In 2e you have to roll under your very low initial skill to hit. Everybody also gets one reaction per turn to counter an attack. My character was a damage dealing badass but I rolled poorly. I never hit. I was so happy when I hit finally, only for the monster to make its parry. The only thing I had going for myself in that combat was that my taking away its reaction that turn enabled the others to hit it. By being early in the initiative order I had essentially the lowest chance to do actual damage - because even if I hit they always get a reaction. The monsters were then finished off by a halfling with a sling in a tree while I was there to absorb damage.

Ironically this was a build pretty optimal for a beginner tank. So let’s suffice it to say I got a full dose of “whiffing” - a property of strict d100 systems where you miss a lot on low levels. Miss - miss - miss - hit-but-parried. That’s a bit frustrating. It ain’t game-breaking bad but it’s not for everyone. On top of that, success levels had no impact whatsoever in combat. A hit is a hit. (A success level back then was rolling 10 under your skill - you get as many success levels as you managed to roll under, so roll 20 under your skill and you get 2. Normally this would make your character shine when doing skill rolls.) 

Now contrast 4e: It’s not so important to roll under your skill anymore. It’s primarily important to roll better than your opponent. It’s all about generating success levels (SL) now. And there’s a very simple way to determine SL too!

Example:

I have a melee skill of 43 and roll 59. I take then tens (higher digit) of my skill and subtract the tens of my roll: 4 - 5 = -1. These are my SL. 

My opponent has a melee skill of 52 but rolls 80. 5 - 8 = -3. This is much worse!

Since I have the better SL (-1 > -3) I win the opposed test and hit even though I missed my actual value. 

In 2e this would have simply been a miss. But here I even do 2 bonus damage because of my 2 SL advantage over my opponent. I like this. The combat was not whiffy. It was not overly fast and furious, either. It fell in the middle. (But goodness help us if we roll poorly...)

Rolling over or under then only has a role to play in determining whether a double (same value on tens and ones) is a critical or a fumble. This is quite a change from 2e but I welcome it.

There’s some side effects to this system, though:

Even if you improve your combat skills, it mostly only matters if you hit a new full number (30, 40, 50, 60) because of how SL are computed, using only the tens. The actual value only comes into play when determining criticals/fumbles, when breaking ties, and if you want, when deciding whether you have +0 SL (I rolled under my skill but not enough to have 1 SL) or -0 SL (I rolled over my skill but not enough to have -1 SL) which can also be used for tie-breaking.

This means advancing from 39 to 40 is much more useful than the next 9 advances for a combat skill.

Example:

My character has a Weapon Skill (short: WS) attribute of 38, 5 advances in the Melee (Basic) skill and 0 advances in the Melee skill, so my Melee (Basic) total is 43 and my Melee is 38. Weapon Skill is among my career attributes so I get to buy an advance in it for 25 XP per advance for the first 5. Melee (Basic) is not in my career skill list for career level 1 (I’m a Huffer) so I have to pay double for skill advances (= 20 XP per advance for the first 5, 30 XP per advance for the next 5, etc). 

Since I have to advance WS to advance in my career, I buy 2 advances in WS for a total of 50XP. I end up with WS 40, Melee 40, and Melee (Basic) 45. This at first seems to not help me any - my Melee (Basic) has not yet risen to 50 and hence I do not get 5 in my tens for computing SL. But: Whenever I use a weapon I’m not specialized for I get to roll my unspecialized Melee skill - and now have a 4 in my tens there. I will not benefit from the weapon’s special qualities (because of lacking specialization) but if I happen to get a higher-damage weapon, I still have pretty much the same chance to hit with it as with Basic weapons in most applicable cases. I just have a 1 in 10 higher chance to fumble (on a 44), for example, and it’s harder for me to break ties. Furthermore, when I roll Melee (Basic) now my chance of fumbling has decreased by 1 in 10 because 44 is no longer a fumble...

Sorry that this is already digging into the intricacies of the advancement system which is worth looking at by itself...

Anyway, knowing this I would have designed the character sheet differently. I would have made a special thick box or circle around the tens of the combat skills as they matter the most. Frankly, a better character sheet is generally in order, though this one does the job for now. I’ve definitely seen worse... (Looking at you Palladium really, really hard...)