A few things I really like about WFRP

MNblockhead said:

It would lose a lot of the flavor and good group-based tactics (with group advantage). I love the players being able to spend more or their advantage points to do more impactful things. It really helps keeps all of the players paying attention to each others turns. It is the single best mechanical improvement over 5e combat, IMO.

Since you are playing in person, without the benefit of the Foundry automations, I would certainly recommend downloading some of the excellent reference sheets and DM screens various people have posted on Reddit and the Rat Catcher's Discord. The official DM screen is okay, but it takes up too much space for random events, etc. and is going to be missing alternative or additional rules from books other than the Core Rulebook.

I would find trying to run WFRP4e to be somewhat annoying just flipping around the Core Rulebook and the supplemental rule books. Yet, you can usually summarize things in a few lines or a table in DM screen or reference sheets that make them much easier to understand.

I'll post some of my favorite DM aids I've found, but won't be able to get to it until Friday night. I'm sure others on this thread have some favorites they can share.

Click to expand...

Following up on this, here are some resources I found helpful. Note that these are redundant and I don't use them in play -- I made my own Journal in Foundry that I use as my quick reference. But I find looking at references and aids others make helpful to understand a game when I'm just starting to get into it and it helps me think about what I want to put into my own DM screen or reference. I go into a lot of detail into the official GM's screen. Some may find this helpful when deciding if they want to spend $30 dollars on it.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition Quick Reference Sheets (by Anders Larsen)

This is my favorite fan-made aid. A dense, but well organized, 5-pay quick reference. Gives page references to the original books in most instances. Summarizes and abbreviate in a manner that is very concise but still readily understandable. The downside is that is all Core Rulebook. No Winds of Magic (improved casting rules) or Up in Arms (e.g. group advantage). I copy-pasted much of this into my custom reference, but replace the magic and advantage rules with my own quick references based on WoM and UiA.

Cheatography Warhammer 4e Combat Cheat Sheet
Note that it doesn't include rules for group advantage. Just the core rules. Also it doesn't include a table that lists the ways you get advantage. It just includes it in relevant movement, surprise, etc. references. But I do think it lists out the basic combat flow very cleanly. I don't use this in play and didn't use it to build my personal reference, but found it helpful to get an overview of combat.

Warhammer Fan Player Aid
Reddit thread discussing it:
It is an 18 page booklet that that collect the most used tables together. It also includes flow charts. I am actually not a great fan of this as it is a lot of content and I think the flow charts make things seem more complicated than they are. But it can be helpful to have the tables, etc. all together in a small reference booklet rather than flipping around the core rulebook.

The Official Cubicle 7 WFRP4e Game Master Screen, which also comes with the 32 page reference booklet.

I find the physical one to be rather expensive ($30), though it does also come with the PDF The PDF-only version is available but is still $15. It came included in the Foundry module. The foundry module makes the screen into Scene, which is really inconvenient to use. I did also buy the PDF version and used a lot of it in my own custom reference.

I think it is actually a well-designed DM screen. I guess what I don't like about it comes more from the fact that I play on Foundry, not in person. This is why the entire first pane is superfluous for me. I do love how they gave page references for everything.

PANE ONE
Two-thirds of the top third of the first pane is taken up with "Common Names of the Old World," which for me is wasted space as I can just generate a random name in the Foundry chat or use the Jodri app in Discord. I also think that the Master skill list, which takes up the other third of the top third the first pane to be rather pointless. I mean they are listed on every character sheet, why do I need them re-printed on the GM screen? The bottom third of the first pane is a character train, motivation, and quirk random generation table. I guess many DMs would find that useful for some rando NPCs. But I find that in prep, I can just crack open the core book. In game, I can just make something up on the fly. Your mileage may vary.

PANE TWO
This one is perfect. A very nice, well laid out, and concise reference to difficulty, tests, advantage, fate, fortune, resilience, resolve, ranges, hit locations, assistance, and psychology. Perfect. I copied most of this into my custom reference.

PANE THREE
This is a useful and well laid out pane. But I wouldn't put everything on it in my own screen/reference.

• Coinage. I guess when first starting it can be useful, but I find it wasted space. How much time do it take to remember what a Gold Crown, Shilling, and Brass Penney are?
• Awarding XP. I don't need this on a DM screen. I don't need to look this up quickly. I can just crack open the core book at the end of a session or between sessions. If you are running a published adventure, the XP awards tend to be printed in the adventures. Also, I don't find it hard to get a sense of how much XP to give per session. For per-adventure or per-campaign XP I certainly don't need that in a ready reference and am don't really see myself using per-adventure or per-campaign XP anyway.
• Completing a Career and Advancement Costs. Better on a player handout and, besides, when advancing your character, opening to that section of the Core Book is hardly a burden. If you are running in Foundry, this is automated. So I find this wasted space for my use case.
• The selling and availability tables are helpful if running in person. In Foundry this is a simple chat command. But, yes, I would want this if running pen & paper in person.
• Common item prices. Waste of space on a GM screen. Would be better to have a more complete, session/adventure specific cheat sheet in my opinion. Or just book mark relevant pages in the Consumer Guide section of the core book. Using Foundry or Jodri, I can pull up this info very easily.
• Movement & Travel is helpful
• Common Conditions is very helpful, but in my custom reference I include all of the conditions.

PANE FOUR

• Weapons & Sheilds and Armor sections. I find this to be wasted space. Even in an in-person game, it is just as easy for me to open the book to the consumer guide. Its such a large table that it takes almost as long for me to look something up on the screen as in the book. The reach and damage values are helpful, I suppose. But that should be on the character sheets and NPC statblocks. And when shopping, again, just as easy to open to the Consumer Guide in the core book and have all the info.
• Creature Size. This is a must have on your DM screen / quick reference

THE GM SCREEN BOOKLET
I was disappointed with this. A lot of general "how to DM stuff", setting flavor, and advice on mechanics. Not bad to read through once, but hardly a useful reference. Also, I don't think it adds that much to similar content in the Core Book.

For what its worth, I'll share a bit on how I made my rule reference. Foundry doesn't have a great universal search for all content. I have the Quick Insert Module, which is great to pull up items by name/title, but it doesn't search in all of the items content. But even when running D&D, using D&D Beyond which has decent full-content search, I didn't always find that convenient in game and still made my own quick references.

Many people will find my approach to be way too much content for a quick reference. An for an in-person game, maybe. But it works for me. I am using the current stable version of foundry with the newer multi-page journals. I have a journal call "Rule References" which I put into my hot bar:



That pulls opens up the Journal holding all my rule references. I have the Pop Out module installed, so I can pop out the journal into its own window. So I can ALT+TAB to and from it as needed during the game.



The left outline shows all of my sheets. When I click on one, the headings from that sheet are shown in the outline, making navigation easy. Unfortunately, the "Search Pages" bar only searches on the page titles, not the headers. While it would be nice if it would search on everything displayable in the outline, I don't find it an issue. Because I have things named and ordered in a manner that makes sense for me, I never have to search. I just click on what I want to look at.

One thing that I love about journals in Foundry is that I don't have to put random tables in the quick reference. I just put a link to the relevant table. When I click on it, it "rolls" on the table and displays the results to the chat window.


Similarly, I can just add links to other rules, NPCs, locations, etc. so that I just need to click on them to pull them up.

MNblockhead said:

I love that WFRP4e is getting some love in ENWorld. Just started a campaign in January.

I'd like to give a call out to the excellent Foundry game systems and modules from Cubicle 7. It really helped me getting into running WFRP quickly and was the deciding factor between WFRP and DCC Dying Earth for me. The crunchier combat and great random tables are fun, but can slow things down at the table, especially with a less experienced DM (hi!). Having that automated by the VTT speeds things up and allows you to enjoy the fun without the page flipping.

The other benefit of the VTT is it addresses my main complaint with the system. The Core Book has some things that were not well play tested. Especially the magic system. The new magic rules in Winds of Magic are great. But not there are two books to reference. Also, a lot of the rules in their subsequent books, esp. Winds of Magic and Up in Arms are not additive, but replacements to core rules. Then the various big adventure books make other subsystems availabe, which are cool, but very soon you are trying to cross reference rules from a small library of books.

Yes, you can just play with the Core rulebook, but I find that the new rules and additional systems fix things I didn't like in the Core Rules and add some cool mechanics, but I find they take more effort to master and plug into the core rules than additional rules for D&D 5e. The WFRP4e game system helps with this so much. You just select which rules variants and optional rules you want to use, everything is searchable and cross referenced, and they add all manner of Quality of Life features that make it much easier and fun to run.

I worry I'm scaring away pen and paper types away from the game. But this is a me thing. For those who like cruncier systems, it certainly is not more difficul than Pathfinder and other crunchy systems. But having the VTT really helped me get started with running WFRP.

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I am more a fan of WFRP 2E. The 4E stuff is gorgeous, but the mechanics needed a few more passes. It’s just too much for me to run without a computer doing most of the work. To me, that’s a really bad sign. Glad you’re digging it though. The Old World is one of my favorite fantasy settings.

MNblockhead said:

Following up on this, here are some resources I found helpful. Note that these are redundant and I don't use them in play -- I made my own Journal in Foundry that I use as my quick reference. But I find looking at references and aids others make helpful to understand a game when I'm just starting to get into it and it helps me think about what I want to put into my own DM screen or reference. I go into a lot of detail into the official GM's screen. Some may find this helpful when deciding if they want to spend $30 dollars on it.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition Quick Reference Sheets (by Anders Larsen)

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition - Quick Reference Sheets by Anders H. L.

A quick reference handout for players learning to play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition

andershl.itch.io

This is my favorite fan-made aid. A dense, but well organized, 5-pay quick reference. Gives page references to the original books in most instances. Summarizes and abbreviate in a manner that is very concise but still readily understandable. The downside is that is all Core Rulebook. No Winds of Magic (improved casting rules) or Up in Arms (e.g. group advantage). I copy-pasted much of this into my custom reference, but replace the magic and advantage rules with my own quick references based on WoM and UiA.

Cheatography Warhammer 4e Combat Cheat Sheet

WFRP 4e Combat Cheat Sheet

Combat rules and modifiers in WFRP4e

cheatography.com

Note that it doesn't include rules for group advantage. Just the core rules. Also it doesn't include a table that lists the ways you get advantage. It just includes it in relevant movement, surprise, etc. references. But I do think it lists out the basic combat flow very cleanly. I don't use this in play and didn't use it to build my personal reference, but found it helpful to get an overview of combat.

Warhammer Fan Player Aid
Reddit thread discussing it:
It is an 18 page booklet that that collect the most used tables together. It also includes flow charts. I am actually not a great fan of this as it is a lot of content and I think the flow charts make things seem more complicated than they are. But it can be helpful to have the tables, etc. all together in a small reference booklet rather than flipping around the core rulebook.

The Official Cubicle 7 WFRP4e Game Master Screen, which also comes with the 32 page reference booklet.

https://cubicle7games.com/wfrp-gamemaster-s-screen

I find the physical one to be rather expensive ($30), though it does also come with the PDF The PDF-only version is available but is still $15. It came included in the Foundry module. The foundry module makes the screen into Scene, which is really inconvenient to use. I did also buy the PDF version and used a lot of it in my own custom reference.

I think it is actually a well-designed DM screen. I guess what I don't like about it comes more from the fact that I play on Foundry, not in person. This is why the entire first pane is superfluous for me. I do love how they gave page references for everything.

PANE ONE
Two-thirds of the top third of the first pane is taken up with "Common Names of the Old World," which for me is wasted space as I can just generate a random name in the Foundry chat or use the Jodri app in Discord. I also think that the Master skill list, which takes up the other third of the top third the first pane to be rather pointless. I mean they are listed on every character sheet, why do I need them re-printed on the GM screen? The bottom third of the first pane is a character train, motivation, and quirk random generation table. I guess many DMs would find that useful for some rando NPCs. But I find that in prep, I can just crack open the core book. In game, I can just make something up on the fly. Your mileage may vary.

PANE TWO
This one is perfect. A very nice, well laid out, and concise reference to difficulty, tests, advantage, fate, fortune, resilience, resolve, ranges, hit locations, assistance, and psychology. Perfect. I copied most of this into my custom reference.

PANE THREE
This is a useful and well laid out pane. But I wouldn't put everything on it in my own screen/reference.

• Coinage. I guess when first starting it can be useful, but I find it wasted space. How much time do it take to remember what a Gold Crown, Shilling, and Brass Penney are?
• Awarding XP. I don't need this on a DM screen. I don't need to look this up quickly. I can just crack open the core book at the end of a session or between sessions. If you are running a published adventure, the XP awards tend to be printed in the adventures. Also, I don't find it hard to get a sense of how much XP to give per session. For per-adventure or per-campaign XP I certainly don't need that in a ready reference and am don't really see myself using per-adventure or per-campaign XP anyway.
• Completing a Career and Advancement Costs. Better on a player handout and, besides, when advancing your character, opening to that section of the Core Book is hardly a burden. If you are running in Foundry, this is automated. So I find this wasted space for my use case.
• The selling and availability tables are helpful if running in person. In Foundry this is a simple chat command. But, yes, I would want this if running pen & paper in person.
• Common item prices. Waste of space on a GM screen. Would be better to have a more complete, session/adventure specific cheat sheet in my opinion. Or just book mark relevant pages in the Consumer Guide section of the core book. Using Foundry or Jodri, I can pull up this info very easily.
• Movement & Travel is helpful
• Common Conditions is very helpful, but in my custom reference I include all of the conditions.

PANE FOUR

• Weapons & Sheilds and Armor sections. I find this to be wasted space. Even in an in-person game, it is just as easy for me to open the book to the consumer guide. Its such a large table that it takes almost as long for me to look something up on the screen as in the book. The reach and damage values are helpful, I suppose. But that should be on the character sheets and NPC statblocks. And when shopping, again, just as easy to open to the Consumer Guide in the core book and have all the info.
• Creature Size. This is a must have on your DM screen / quick reference

THE GM SCREEN BOOKLET
I was disappointed with this. A lot of general "how to DM stuff", setting flavor, and advice on mechanics. Not bad to read through once, but hardly a useful reference. Also, I don't think it adds that much to similar content in the Core Book.

Click to expand...

Yeah. I had to make my own huge cheat sheets with rules explanations, digging through the rules to find things, and constantly added to the files. It was a huge pain in the ass.

overgeeked said:

I am more a fan of WFRP 2E. The 4E stuff is gorgeous, but the mechanics needed a few more passes. It’s just too much for me to run without a computer doing most of the work. To me, that’s a really bad sign. Glad you’re digging it though. The Old World is one of my favorite fantasy settings.

Click to expand...

Now that I have 24 hours of playtime in, I feel confident enough to run it pen & paper. But I admit I almost bailed on it until I tried the WFRP4e system in Foundry. The thing is that the mechanics really are not that complicated and are actually pretty elegant. BUT...

1. I got into it after it had been out for years, so the errata has been applied.
2. I'm using the Winds of Magic rules for casting, which "fixes" the Core rules (note: there are many who like the core version, but the WoM addressed the complaints that many had).
3. They could do a better job how they present the rules. I feel that when working with the books, I'm having to flip through the book to three different places to determine how some things should work. To be fair, I have this complaint with most printed rules for cruncier systems.

Once things click through play, it was all much more intuitive. The only thing that might annoy me with in-person play is the random tables that are used throughout the game, and often. Crits, miscasts, etc. But having cheat sheets printed with the tables would address that. Running it in Foundry, however, makes this a much nicer experience for me as it just automates that. I have the same issue with Dungeon Crawl Classics. I love the flavor that the random tables give, but it can slow things down when running with pen and paper.

MNblockhead said:

Now that I have 24 hours of playtime in, I feel confident enough to run it pen & paper. But I admit I almost bailed on it until I tried the WFRP4e system in Foundry. The thing is that the mechanics really are not that complicated and are actually pretty elegant. BUT...

1. I got into it after it had been out for years, so the errata has been applied.
2. I'm using the Winds of Magic rules for casting, which "fixes" the Core rules (note: there are many who like the core version, but the WoM addressed the complaints that many had).
3. They could do a better job how they present the rules. I feel that when working with the books, I'm having to flip through the book to three different places to determine how some things should work. To be fair, I have this complaint with most printed rules for cruncier systems.

Once things click through play, it was all much more intuitive. The only thing that might annoy me with in-person play is the random tables that are used throughout the game, and often. Crits, miscasts, etc. But having cheat sheets printed with the tables would address that. Running it in Foundry, however, makes this a much nicer experience for me as it just automates that. I have the same issue with Dungeon Crawl Classics. I love the flavor that the random tables give, but it can slow things down when running with pen and paper.

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And how shields work. And advantage. And…

It’s just too much for me. But, admittedly, that was before all the supplements fixed the core.

At least Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG has the Reference Booklet and Purple Sorcerer.

overgeeked said:

And how shields work. And advantage. And…

It’s just too much for me. But, admittedly, that was before all the supplements fixed the core.

At least Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG has the Reference Booklet and Purple Sorcerer.

Click to expand...

All fixed matey.

Shields a +2 to armour if you’re holding them and you can defend with whichever skill or weapon you want.
Group advantage is great.

Though I must say I struggled to remember the To Hit Roll modifiers table. Particularly what you got for outnumbering, range and cover. After a few sessions it becomes second nature. I also realised that it corresponded to the difficulty levels. So outnumbering 2:1 or short range made it an average (+20) test and 3:1 or point blank became an Easy (+40) test.

It’s interesting with crits. The game has the reputation for being so deadly that you lose an hand or leg or get a lobotomy. But I find crit table rolls are relatively rare. A few reasons…

- Critica Deflection: any character or monster can deflect a critical from rolling doubles (or 0’s with some weapons) by sacrificing a point of armour on the location struck. This makes critical a much less likely for combat based characters. Only crits that are gained from dropping to 0 wounds can’t be deflected.

- Quick Death: Normal mooks don’t need to go through the full critical dying process you can simply have them die at zero wounds. No point rolling criticals in that instance.

So you’re only really rolling on the crit table if someone without armour (which shouldn’t be many folks) or someone drops to zero - which happens but in my games certainly rare. We’re rolling on the crit table zero to three times a session, depending on the amount of combat.

TheSword said:

It’s interesting with crits. The game has the reputation for being so deadly that you lose an hand or leg or get a lobotomy. But I find crit table rolls are relatively rare. A few reasons…

- Critica Deflection: any character or monster can deflect a critical from rolling doubles (or 0’s with some weapons) by sacrificing a point of armour on the location struck. This makes critical a much less likely for combat based characters. Only crits that are gained from dropping to 0 wounds can’t be deflected.

- Quick Death: Normal mooks don’t need to go through the full critical dying process you can simply have them die at zero wounds. No point rolling criticals in that instance.

So you’re only really rolling on the crit table if someone without armour (which shouldn’t be many folks) or someone drops to zero - which happens but in my games certainly rare. We’re rolling on the crit table zero to three times a session, depending on the amount of combat.

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Yeah, I think many people understand "gritty" as "deadly." I think WFRPs reputation for deadliness is overblown. But the rules do make rushing into combat something you want to think about moreso than 5e. Some reasons for this:

1. Yes, there are ways to mitigate the deadliness, but there simply are more chances for bad rolls (or good NPC rolls) to make bad things happen. If you are facing a very beefy foe or are outnumbered, not only will the enemy have bonuses to their rolls but may have many more attacks. The existence of crits makes the action economy matter that much more. I like the the flavor of someone bashing away at a foes armor in a fight. It also gives another thing you have to spend coin on. Battles can be costly no only in wounds and injuries but in gear.

2. Advantage. Advantage has a way of snowballing. One you have it you have more opportunities of getting more. I like how this captures the feeling of battle swinging to one sides favor. The building up of momentum. If enemies the PCs are facing get in some good roles and hits, they can start building up advantage. That can make things go very bad for the PCs quickly. And vice versa of course. When PCs are overpowered compared to the foes, most of the time the PCs are going to win. But it isn't as much of a given in WFRP as it is with DnD 5e, esp. as advantage gives the DM a powerful tool to make enemy tactics matter more. (And the players have more reason to be tactical in their preparation for and during combat.). I find that group advantage makes things a bit less swingy, but it strikes a good balance. I do, however, kinda miss how with advantage in the Core Rules, you can have one character whom the dice gods decided to smile upon become of bloody snowball of advantage wreaking havoc on the battlefield.

3. Difficult in-combat healing/aid, slow healing, and lingering injuries. Unless you have a higher XP party fighting enemies they far outclass, they are not going to be running from on combat to another. You don't just heal with a short rest and even a long rest isn't necessarily going to get you back to full health. When you do get injuries, they affect you for a long time. Certain injuries--and most injuries if not properly treated--can lead to permanent disabilities.

4. Disease. I know many groups just ignore diseases. The Core Rulebook calls out that you can ignore the whole section on disease. Other groups love using the disease rules. I'm in the later camp. And disease adds to the deadliness of the campaign. Not only from the potential of dying from a disease, but also because of how disease can make you less effective in combat, making combat more deadly for ill characters.

5. The setting. I realize you can play WFRP in your own setting or change the default setting anyway you want. But the default setting as presented in the books is not a modern, accepting one. You start getting exposed to chaos, get some mutations--life can become very difficult for you. Open displays of magic can bring you trouble. Your social status can bring you opportunities or trouble. If a DM really leans into the setting flavor, it makes the game a bit deadlier.

So WFRP is not old-school D&D deadly in terms of character death. There are no real save or suck mechanics. A careful tactical party in WFRP is probably less likely to get a quick death or TPK than low level characters in OD&D. But incautious players will see their characters suffer a long miserable process of slowly dying from injury and disease, though they still have a not-negligible change of having their armor bashed away and dying a quick death on the battlefield. Thank Sigmar for small mercies.

I'll give an example. One of my players is playing an Ogre Butcher. I was worried that this would be OP. But it hasn't been. Part of this is that their tactics generally have him as the tank while the squishier (all of the other three) characters try to keep their distance, use ranged attacks whenever possible, and farm for advantage.

Ogres can take a lot of wounds for low XP characters. Their tactics work well. But 24 hours of play time into the game and the poor Ogre has broken arm and a broken leg, walking around in casts. -20 on his attacks. Halved movement. -20 on any test the rely on mobility. About all he can do in combat is be a meat shield.

We are coming up on a long period of down time so he will finally have a chance to heal up. Also, because they are in a sizable city was access to proper medical attention, he's not going to suffer permanent disadvantages. But if they were out in the wilderness and/or in very hostile territory, there is a good change he'd be done for.

For country music fans, WFRP the experience fighter is well represented by the protagonist Tiger Man McCool in Shel Silverstein's "The Winner". I won't spam the thread with the lyrics. If interested you can read them here: The Winner lyrics chords | Bobby Bare

Fights can take a lot out of you and have lasting negative effects in Warhammer.