Nah, you probably did it right. WFRP is a deadly system, which cuts both ways. PCs will win fights hard and fast, much of the time. Its just that, when the fight turns, when they get bad luck on rolls or are outnumbered/outmatched, they die hard and fast.
As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let’s not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.
WFRP isn’t meant to be “punishing” or “difficult” or whatever other term you want to come up with for “mean to the players.” No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that’s just bad GMing. You’re here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that’s not an accomplishment.
What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC’s still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is “harder” but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.
High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that’s OK. They should be able to do that, they’re a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they’ll never feel completely safe even though they’ll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.
The 40k ones that follow on Dark Heresy all play the same way as WFRP: basic attributes with most values being a 0-100 range, lots of skills to sink points in, overall same rules for combat with similar damage and critical damage chart. Mechanically, they’re all effectively the same game, changing only the kind of adventures you end up having (depressed soldiers in Only War, lawless space hijinks in Rogue Trader, spehss mareens in Deathwatch, evil corruption and worship in Black Crusade)
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I didn’t even know there were multiple. One player of my group recently ordered some rulebooks for something else and they put like a starter book light in there as well. It’s like 20 pages. Only War means you pay Guardsmen? That sounds great.
Yup, I also specified Dark Heresy because there’s a newer, different 40k RPG, Wrath and Glory, that uses a very different set of mechanics and has an expansion for playing as Eldar. I can’t speak about it, haven’t taken the time to read or ever had the chance to play
Nah, you probably did it right. WFRP is a deadly system, which cuts both ways. PCs will win fights hard and fast, much of the time. Its just that, when the fight turns, when they get bad luck on rolls or are outnumbered/outmatched, they die hard and fast.
As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let’s not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.
WFRP isn’t meant to be “punishing” or “difficult” or whatever other term you want to come up with for “mean to the players.” No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that’s just bad GMing. You’re here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that’s not an accomplishment.
What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC’s still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is “harder” but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.
High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that’s OK. They should be able to do that, they’re a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they’ll never feel completely safe even though they’ll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.
Just ignoring Paranoia.
Paranoia isn’t so much “mean” as it is calling your best friend “fuckface” in front of his mom.
Calling the perfect game mean is an act of treason. Please proceed to the nearest Traitor-B-Gone tube for correction.
Can you speak on the 40k system as well? Is it worth a shot?
The 40k ones that follow on Dark Heresy all play the same way as WFRP: basic attributes with most values being a 0-100 range, lots of skills to sink points in, overall same rules for combat with similar damage and critical damage chart. Mechanically, they’re all effectively the same game, changing only the kind of adventures you end up having (depressed soldiers in Only War, lawless space hijinks in Rogue Trader, spehss mareens in Deathwatch, evil corruption and worship in Black Crusade)
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I didn’t even know there were multiple. One player of my group recently ordered some rulebooks for something else and they put like a starter book light in there as well. It’s like 20 pages. Only War means you pay Guardsmen? That sounds great.
Yup, I also specified Dark Heresy because there’s a newer, different 40k RPG, Wrath and Glory, that uses a very different set of mechanics and has an expansion for playing as Eldar. I can’t speak about it, haven’t taken the time to read or ever had the chance to play
This sounds like a blast
Its an amazing system if you want your games to feel less like Skyrim and more like Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
But, y’know, with magic and horrifying chaos monstrosities.