Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Second Edition - A Review

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying was (and is) a well-loved game, so it isn't surprising that there was a second edition, although it took a very long time to see print: WFRP 1e was re-issued in its entirety first and only later was there a proper 'new' version (my review of the First Edition is here).  It was published by Fantasy Flight games and was quite well supported for a time with a large number of adventures and sourcebooks for a while.

WFRP 1e was liked but it was a slightly messy game.  Individually its mechanics were reasonably intuitive if sometimes a little wonky.  It also wasn't a bit balanced: in particular the character generation spat out a character that might be quite good or might be unbelievably awful.  The magic system sort of worked but it seemed quite a straight port from a battle game and it really showed: there wasn't really a way to talk about magic in the game without talking about mechanics i.e. characters in the game would kind of have to ask "is there a level 3 cleric in the house?" or something not far off that.  Some individual skills and so on flat out didn't work or were pretty useless.

Anyway, WFRP 2 came in and cleaned up most of that whilst retaining most of the distinctive elements of the system.  Most things were based of a d100 roll against a score out of 100 to succeed, with a couple of sub-systems (damage, casting spells) using something slightly different.  This always brings problems - essentially the failure rate will nearly always be unrealistically high - although there are ways around this.  The two most straightforward are, firstly: make sure the adventures are structured so that the opposition has to make lots of rolls too (to give them plenty of chances to fluff things); and secondly, to allow many automatic successes for simply having the skill.  This latter is the most important, I think.  If a character with Trade(Cook) skill has to roll against a characteristic to produce a tasty meal, then a not-tasty meal will be produced probably half to two-thirds of the time, but if the skill itself is sufficient in most circumstances, then the character will produce a tasty meal 100% of the time (and might only have to roll if trying to create something extra-special, or with minimal ingredients, or similar).

Character generation remained very similar in structure although the calibration was different.  Pick a fantasy race, roll up some characteristics, roll for or choose a career, get a bunch of skills based on that career and race.  Most careers have a few this or that skills and talents allowing a degree of customization.  I haven't counted them all out but it felt as if there are slightly fewer basic careers in WFRP 2e, since some of the 1e careers got put into 'container careers' like "Peasant" and "Burgher" and "Rogue" which swept up some conceptually quite similar 1e careers and jumbled them together: this allows each character to have more, and more choice of, skills. On the other hand, some players did consider this a loss of flavour and they did have a point.  And in any case, not all areas where treated in this way: there were more individual flavours of soldiers and professional fighters, even though those are perhaps more similar than some of the careers which got lumped into container careers.  Be all that as it may, the careers were a lot more balanced mechanically, having much more equal advance schemes and numbers of skills and talents.  Everything was a 'skill' in 1e, but 2e broke this out into skills (which were tied to a characteristic and could be developed independently) and talents (which could not) i.e. a skill could be taken up to three times, with the skill being given a +10% bonus for the second time and +20% bonus for the third time.  This was basically much better than the previous system, where skills were straightforward yes/no things and only the characteristic really mattered (although, as is on brand for 1e, there were a couple of exceptions to this).  Conceptually too, the WFRP 1e skills are all over the place and the 2e skills are much more coherent.  This was mainly achieved by putting many skills into similar categories and then making these skills into sub-skills.  This was good in itself and also allows easier customization, since these container skills (like "Common Knowledge", "Trade" and "Performer") explicitly recognize that you can just add them in if you need them.  Want 'Cartwright' to be a specific Trade skill? Go for it.  Fighting with weapons still isn't a skill, amusingly enough: it is basically a characteristic, and special weapons are 'Talents' (so the bonuses don't stack).  I think this was a missed opportunity, base WS and BS should have been a derived score from Strength and Agility or somesuch, and then you could take actual skills in weapons.  Maybe that is just me.

The different player character races remained the same as in 1e, although the strengths and weaknesses were quite different.  In 1e, Elves were pretty much 'better', the only downside being that the lower number of Fate Points (i.e. 'lives') put a higher premium on not fluffing important rolls early in the game.  Halflings were pretty weak.  Dwarves weren't great but given that they had an extra point of Toughness - which given some experience, could lead to the almost invincible 'Naked Dwarf' (a Dwarf so tough that even without armour they were normally immune to damage from peer opponents) and a high average Weapon Skill, they were a reasonable choice for Warrior characters.  Since 2e reduced a number of Elvish characteristics, including Weapon Skill, then Dwarves are clearly the best choice for warrior characters in 2e.  Overall, Elves were really downgraded from 1e, now being no longer better than Humans in Intelligence, Willpower or Fellowship.  I can see why all this was done from a game balance point of view but I am not sure about several of the individual characteristics myself.

As an aside, characters are universally weaker than in 1e.  This is from a maths quirk, which I am not sure if it was intentional or not.  Characteristics like Strength and Toughness are now percentage based like Intelligence and Agility and so on, but to make them usable in the combat mechanics, they have a 'derived' score, which is the first digit in their percentile score.  So a character with a Strength of 37 has a derived Strength bonus of 3 - all fairly clear.  However, for a human, this is generated by rolling 2d10+20 (as are all the other percentage characteristics) , thus giving a range of 22 to 40 with an average score of 31.  In the 1e by contrast, there was only the Strength bonus characteristic which was generated by rolling D3+1.  So in 1e, a full third of human characters had a starting Strength bonus of 4, and now that is down to 1-in-a-100.  This is modified a little by the possession of certain skills/talents and 'Shallya's mercy' - in 2e, you are allowed to substitute one roll for an average score - but this is fiddling in the margins.  Weirdly Strength and Toughness were given this treatment but Movement was made really vanilla: every Human and Halfling begins the game with same Movement score.  I don't know why they didn't apply the same logic to this characteristic.

The one area where some strange inconsistencies appeared is in the cost of the trappings given to each character.  Mostly these are fine, but 2e introduced some quite high costs for certain types of weapons and armour as a limiting factor for access...but then handed them out to some of the starting careers.  The Roadwarden gets an absolutely eye-watering amount of equipment for free, for example.  I think that some of the world-building here is wonky: it posits some quite advanced gunpowder weaponry simultaneously with gunpowder weapons being very rare and very expensive.  This is hard to justify, but also hard to make work in game terms.  Why bother buying them (or if you are a mercenary captain or someuch, several), when you can buy a house complete with private bar and harem for less?  Don't get me wrong, the equipment chapter is good, introduces some useful new concepts (e.g. variable craftsmanship products, and what that means in terms of price and effect), but some of the calibration seems wonky.

The combat system is quite similar to the 1e version, although it has been made more complicated by introducing menus of specific actions.  I can see why the designer did this although it wasn't particularly to my taste: I am guessing that lots of WFRP games emphasized precise resolution of tactical combat in a way that my games didn't.  Basically, in tactical combat there are a bunch of actions which are either free, cost half-an-action (and can thus be combined with other stuff) or cost a full action.  At this point, we must go on a slight detour and talk about the 'Attacks' characteristic.  1e had (and 2e retained) the characteristic of 'Attacks' which was basically how many times a character could attack in one round.  I think this was to allow Aragorn or Jackie Chan-esque moves by which our heroes could dispatch multiple enemies very quickly.  Because 1e is weird and quirky, lots of creatures got lots of attacks by means of having different natural weapons (doing this off the top of my head, but some creatures who aren't notably better designed than humanoids for combat might get 2 attacks, one for biting and one for kicking with hooves).  This always led to logical problems: if my character can attack twice in a turn, why can't my character do two lots of other stuff which would normally 'cost' an attack?  The 2e 'actions' seem to be a long way round of solving this, which it kind of does, at some cost in complexity.  For me on the other hand, it solves a non-problem: I had always seen Attacks as a highly specialized combat multiplier with nothing it needed to explain beyond that, and otherwise, the limit on a character's activity is what could reasonably be achieved in 5, 10 or 60 seconds, or whatever.  Anyway, diversion over - it is basically the same system, with a more complicated and yet cleaner action system overlaid, with various bits tweaked.  Unarmed combat and parrying seem to have been sorted out from the (un-errata'd) mess in 1e.  Ulric's Fury (exploding dice for damage) is still in there, but since the system is d10 based, it comes up less often.  All-in-all though, it is still the same system: reasonably random often quite lethal, faster than some other games.

The magic system was the most revised of all the sub-systems.  The 1e system worked, more-or-less, but was very quirky, particularly for magical novices and experienced wizards.  Apprentices were pretty useless at magic, both by not having many spells and the chances of fluffing them being quite high.  Career advancement mostly eliminated the second issue but not necessarily the first - spells could cost a lot of experience points to obtain.  In any case, the 2e uses a 'Spell List' system which gives characters access to more spells earlier on, but not realistically the ability to cast them.  This does work better although at the cost of a degree of individuality compared to 1e wizards who were learning each spell individually: this was in line with the 'schools of magic' which had been introduced into the background material.  I actually prefer the 1e approach personally, but 2e is definitely mechanically cleaner.  Ingredients were made as optional boosters rather than absolute requirements too: this avoided the weirdness of 1e in which some spells had trivially easy to obtain material requirements, and some had insanely difficult ones, and these were absolute requirements.

The above gives a decent indication of the direction of travel of the whole volume: the mechanics are cleaned up, tied in more closely to developments in the Warhammer battle game and often made more directly linked to the background material; and made the game more balanced.  This was on the whole a very positive development but with one downside: where the battle game changes were made to give better battle games, this did not necessarily lead to a better roleplaying world.  For myself, the magic system is an example of this.  But in all the other areas: religion and cults, psychology, diseases, languages, game economy etc. then 2e is definitely better, minus the odd quirk.  As an example, I liked the Gods of Law, the slightly less caricatured cults, Dwarf and Halfling wizards and so on.  As for the general DM advice and background stuff, it is all better done and better presented but there is perhaps a tad less of it.  This is most obvious in the Bestiary, which has far, far fewer creatures in, although this is partly redeemed by having a more useful set of NPCs.  All this stuff is fleshed out much more in the extra published material for 2e but 1e had, I don't know, the feel of an RPG grimoire with just 'more' packed in, even if lots of it was in sketch format.

One area where 1e is much better is the sample adventure. I prefer The Oldenhaller Contract in almost every way to Through the Drakwald.  The latter seems much more geared to introducing the setting, whereas the former is a basic, but basically fine, dungeon-crawl adventure.  It is perhaps a bit of a railroad, but the less so than Through the Drakwald. As long as the characters survive the first fight, it is more or less plain sailing after that and it basically doesn't matter what they do in the sub plot.  The sub plot is 'interesting' as a story and some groups will be able to get some good roleplaying out of it...but more action-orientated groups might not make much of it.  I also don't like it that the major magic-using NPC isn't really using the magic rules from the rulebook, which is bad twice over in a starting adventure.  Ultimately, whenever I have played it with new players, they absolutely love it if they succeed in escaping the sewers in the Oldenhaller Contract but it is hard to even imagine the same at the end of Through the Drakwald.  In all honestly, it needs a few more encounters and a few more rewards, it is just too light as it is.

In summary, if you liked Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e, you should like this and nod in agreement with most, if not all, of the changes.  It is relatively easy to take elements you prefer from 1e into 2e in any case.  I have played through Through the Drakwald and the Ashes of Middenheim adventures recently, so please look out for the playthroughs being posted up (will contain spoilers!).