My Experience of Warhammer Third Edition

[Magnus]

I played third edition Warhammer for the first time this Saturday. I'll write my thoughts here:

First thing I noticed is that the game looks more like a boardgame than a traditional RPG book. There are cards for classes, actions, talents all packed in a box about the size of Descent board game.

Character creation was straightforward, and would be quick the second time through.

Character sheets were 1/2 of a letter size page, with much of the information relevant to your character held on standard cards. I'd prefer being able to keep all the details of my character all on a single larger sheet of paper.


Class: I draw three class cards and got to choose one out of: Initiate, agitator and Envoy. I went with Envoy, giving myself INT and Fellowship bonuses.

Race: As a high elf, I had fixed racial stat bonuses to Agility and Intelligence and less point buy points. Racial bonuses apply before point buying, so racial modifiers increase the minimum for these stats, but not the maximum for racial stats. Naturally, elves get night vision. Elves also get a free focus talent, I chose one that gave me a bonus on INT checks. Unfortunately, because focus slots aren't available to my class, I'd have to form up a party, and put the talent in a party slot before I could use it. This particullarly mechanic was laughably arbitrary, and could have provided material for an Order of the Stick episode.

Remaining points could be used to buy: Talents, Actions, Wealth, and Skills. I like the option of controlling starting wealth, and the difference seemed significant enough to make the choice worthwhile... although I stuck with a modest 1 point in wealth. Actions give your player additional options beside the standard actions such as strike, dodge, parry. Skills and specialities affect the size of your dice pool for actions. Talents seem to provide bonuses the synergize or enhance actions. Talents, and actions are represented by cards.

Cards were handy references, but also somewhat cumbersome requiring more desk space than normal... but since the powers are on the card, they provide a handy reference which hopefully will reduce delays for people to look up their abilities. Finally, a stance meter controls how aggressive or conservative your character acts. Different classes are disposed to more or less conservativism/aggression. My envoy was mostly conservative.

With character creation done, we began our test adventure in a prototypical fantasy medieval town, complete with tavern, and gobling ear boounty and nearby elven ruins. Adventurers form up to go collect bounties and explore ruins.

My first interaction was crossing a bridge, where I tried to persuade the bridgeman to waive the normal toll. This required a charm roll.

Dice pool involved two dimensions: The first was success/failure represented by hammers or crossed-swords and decided whether you accomplished whatever task you . The second was boon/bane representing luck. I achieved no successes, but two boon results. This meant that although I failed at my intended goal, the bridgeman offered to let us cross back for free if we came back with elf ears. So good outcome, but not in the way I had attempted.

Up the road, I spotted the goblin ambush, and alerted my compatriots. Combat was fairly simple, with limited variability. Generally, attacks either hit or missed, but damage was constant. A few of the players with more martial classes had some more combat focused action options, which sounded interesting. I used a leadership action to give my allies extra maneuvers, but was somewhat disappointed that exra movement appears to be quite common.

Actions have various refresh times, tracked by counters. It's similar to the turn based mechanic that should be familiar to anyone who has played world of warcraft. Not sure I like this mechanic, since it involves a lot of token tracking, and also limits the number of players who can play a given actoin unless you have an extra set of action cards.

Killing the goblins went smoothly. Even my non-martial Envoy character was able to finish of a goblin with a bow from range. Starting PCs seemed relatively powerful.

At the end of session we each put our character sheets, and associated action and talent cards in plastic bags for next week.

[Magnus]

System did grow on me some. I liked the critical wound system, which can affect your player, even on the first hit. One of the other players had some bad luck with that... i.e. he wasn't close to dying, but keeps getting critical hits to the leg that slow him down. It seems a more realistic touch; of course I wasn't the one that kept drawing the same critical effect.

Main complaint is the unneccessary complexity of the system. There are a lot of dice, a lot of counters to track, including a stance counter (passive/aggressive) that doesn't add enough to justify; not that stance is complicated, it's just that there are so many other tokens already to track the action refresh times.