WFRP 2e: Optimization

 Assuming you want to optimize a character for something in WFRP 2e, how do you go about doing it? The first thing to realize is that it takes much longer than in WFRP 1e, for two reasons:

 

1 - Advance is in slower increments, i.e. in +5 jumps rather than +10 jumps. This is the more obvious of the two.

 

2 -  You can only go to and through advanced careers in WFRP 2e by completing all the advances in the preceding career. This is a massive change from WFRP 1e. The latter effectively says pick the advances and skills you want. WFRP 2e says in order to pick up the stuff you do want, you are going to have to pick up some stuff you don't. 

 

So getting to optimize a specific characteristic is much harder because you have to complete careers, and all careers are much more similar in terms of the number of advances and skills than in WFRP 1e. What you don't have to do however is take the same skill multiple times: you can if you want, but you don't have to. What you are looking for, therefore, is the most duplication of skills and advances as you go on the identified career path. Not only is it longer, it is much harder to work out.

Weapon Skill. To optimize Weapon Skill, you need +40 in advances plus the Warrior Born talent. You also need to be a Dwarf. The careers which have the necessary advance are Champion, Daemon Slayer, Grail Knight or Grandmaster. Since you are a Dwarf, you don't care about the latter two, it is Daemon Slayer you want via Troll Slayer and Giant Slayer. For everyone else, Mercenary, Veteran, Champion is the way to go.

 

Ballistic Skill.  Again, you need +40 in advances plus the Marksmanship Talent. Only two choices here, Champion and Targeteer; and Elf and Halfling are the better races to be. The optimal route is clearly Hunter to Targeteer.

 

Strength.  You need +30 and the Very Strong talent. You can be either a Human or a Dwarf, and go for Daemon Slayer (via Troll Slayer and Giant Slayer)  or Grail Knight (via Knight Errant, Knight of the Realm, Questing Knight). The latter is also a slow route for Weapon Skill optimization. 

 

Toughness. You need +30 and the Very Resilient talent. Same career pairing as for Strength, but this time it specifically pays to be a Dwarf, so Daemon Slayer is the best option.

 

Agility. You need +40 and the Lightning Reactions talent.  So you need to be an Elf or Halfling Master Thief. Go there through Thief and Cat Burglar.

 

Intelligence. You need +40 and the Savvy talent. And you need to be a Human, specifically an Ungol female, because the career with the highest Intelligence seems to be...Hag Mother?(!) This is basically crazy and pretty much an epic fail of design. However, get there through Wise Woman and Hag Witch.

 

Willpower. You need +40 and the Coolheaded talent. Wizard Lord, Ice Witch, Runelord are your choices, so anything but a Halfling will work. Ice Witch looks by far the quickest (Apprentice Witch, Ice Maiden, Ice Witch).

 

Fellowship. You need +40 and the suave talent. The Ambassador. Seems reasonable! Lots of broadly similar routes, but Village Elder to Politician to Noble Lord to Ambassador looks possible here. Whatever, you should be a Halfling though (I can't recall if Halflings can be Village Elders in the sense of the career; but if not, there are lots of roughly analagous Basic careers which work very nearly as well). I don't think this is quite a strong a fail as Intelligence, but 'Halflings, master diplomatists' is pretty jarring in terms of world-building.

 

Attacks. Unlike in WFRP 1e, where Assassin was THE choice for maximizing attacks, and thus combat power, there are a ton of options for getting (the maximum) two additional attacks in WFRP 2e: Assassin, Captain, Champion, Crusader, Daemon Slayer, Faceless, Ghost Strider, Grail Knight, Grandmaster, Judicial Champion, Killer of the Dead, Knight of the Inner Circle, Knight of the Raven, Outlaw Chief, Questing Knight, Scourge of God, Sea Captain, Warleader, Witch Hunter. I think the best choices look to be Marauder to Warleader, and weirdly Village Elder(!) to Faceless or Outlaw Chief. You are looking for a Basic career to an Advanced career with 2 attacks in a single jump, essentially.

 

Wounds. Not quite as many as for Attacks, but still loads of choices: Champion, Crusader, Daemon Slayer, Grail Knight, Grandmaster, Knight of the Inner Circle, Knight of the Raven, Scourge of God. Perhaps Monk, Friar, Flagellant, Scourge of God is your way to go here, if you want to solely optimize on Wounds (you don't want to do that of course, you want to be a Daemon Slayer; or if you don't like Dwarves, a Grail Knight; or if you don't like Humans, a Champion).

 

Movement. This isn't a matter of careers really, it is a matter of being an Elf, and acquiring Fleet Footed and then Flee! You can get the first from being a Vagabond or Woodsman, then get the second via Agitator, Anchorite, Carcassonne Shepherd, Camp Follower, Charcoal Burner, Ex-Convict, Gambler, Grave Robber, Horse Coper, Lamplighter, Peasant, Rogue, Servant or Slave.

 

Magic. Runelord, Ice Witch and Wizard Lord are your choices (again) here, so anything but a Halfling again. Ice Witch is again just better (on the assumption that the magic traditions are more-or-less of equal value to you).

 

Optimizing is harder in most senses in 2e rather than 1e - not least because there are more possible routes and you have to navigate them much more slowly.  That said, there are some real power careers here. Daemon Slayer is unbeatable for combat types; with Grail Knights and Champions a decent choice if you didn't want to play a Dwarf. Ice Witches are by far the best magic users. Targeteer and Master Thief can be reached quite quickly to fill in those niches. Ambassador is a very reasonable choice for top of the Fellowship tree, but it takes a while to get there: Hag Mother is a totally unreasonable choice for top of the Intelligence tree, and it doesn't take that long to get there. I can't help noticing that a couple of the out-there choices come from Realm of the Ice Queen.

In Praise of Something Rotten in Kislev...

The WFRP first edition adventure Something Rotten in Kislev has not always had the warmest reception over the years. And most of the criticisms - inconsistency in tone, inconsistency with the existing setting, primarily - are entirely reasonable. I happen to think that the adventures themselves are quite interesting, if unevenly executed, but I wouldn't press this point too hard with someone who disagreed. But the grounds I wish to defend it on is: the rules as written don't really explain Zombie and Skeleton guards. There is a fairly wafty 'some areas may make certain creatures not subject to instability', but no mechanical implementation of this at all. So I give a certain amount of credit to Something Rotten in Kislev for making some nods in this direction, and more credit for actually writing about 'A Day in the Life of Necromancer' which is convincing to the extent that, given Necromancers, this is maybe the kind of thing that they would spend their time trying to do. I like different types of magic to be actually different, and to a wider extent than just the bad guys use skeletons and daemons, the good guys use nature spirits. 

 

Now, just like everything else in SRiK, the implementation is very uneven and it still doesn't add up to consistent and usable mechanics, but there are some reasonable ideas in there of how they might be done. Of course, SRiK then does some terrible things and one of the NPCs really undercuts some of the core ideas in the rules: for instance, the absolute maximum number of non-Petty Magic spells that can be learned is 40 (Intelligence divided by 10 multiplied by level) (or 50 if you are using Realms of Sorcery with its Level 5 wizards). A maxxed-out Giant Slayer (or any combat-optimized character really) that achieves surprise against any Wizard has a fair chance of doing some tremendous damage in a single round of attack against any humanoid character. It is hard to one-shot a character with 15 or 16 Wounds (And such characters should be very rare - , but given 3-4 attacks and decent Strength and Strike Mighty Blow, it isn't so hard to do in one round. The only defence really is to have sufficient magic items to make a character more-or-less invulnerable. And this is all a good thing: if no characters are practically invulnerable, then each character is forced to act with at least a due amount of caution. 

The above wasn't really a digression: it is more pointing out that things are better if everything is playing by the same rules. So, to circle back to the beginning, then having a supplement which attempts to explain something a little more about what is actually going on with the Undead.

Of the adventures, the first one was fine, although a little railroad-y: the scenario just isn't that hard, except for the bits which are forcing you to engage with the spirits, which are simultaneously flavourful yet pretty annoying. There is a decent combat encounter and a dungeon.  The second one is more challenging: it is almost, but not quite, a railroad as in it clearly wants the characters to do certain things, but it does sort of leave open the option to tackle it in anyway the players want, even though a lot of effort is expended in justifying the GM in saying no. But it does have lots of interesting role-playing opportunities: goblins and barbarians and undead and magic-users you can actually talk to. That said, the tone is weirdly awful and it encourages the GM to railroad and do massive info-dumps on the players and be in a fairly adversarial mode generally. I honestly think you can just use the set-up (which is great) and get on with it and ignore much of the GM advice and just let the players' roleplaying and preferences determine the shape of the adventure.

But what is given with one hand is taken away with the other. Having praised the book for tackling one set of rules vagueness, it is rather let down by the author making clear is his love of "unkillable plot
NPCs". I consider it a design failure in general and in WFRP particularly, especially when you have to break core rules to do  it. Nothing in WFRP 1e can know more than 40 (non-petty) spells, period, and you have to have the ingredients to hand; or you have to have the magic items to hand. There are actual statted enemies in this and other WFRP 1e campaigns which approach theoretical maxima. One of the refreshing things about WFRP 1e as written is that everything is playing the same game. There was just no reason to demolish that in SRiK. I especially hope it wasn't because someone couldn't be bothered to stat it out. Anyway, there is nothing to stop a GM from doing that to the two unkillables in SRiK. And since they will no longer have plot immunity, they can start treating the characters with a bit more respect, and thus make the negotiations and dialogue real.

The last adventure is really just a raid and a dungeon crawl. They are both pretty well-done with lots of fun details, but let down by one trap the ending, which goes for another 'unkillable NPC'. Again, I recommend ignoring this and just stat up the guy. The optimal solution for the adventure as written is to get not very far into the dungeon and then bug out,which rewards a very unusual kind of player. It isn't quite Tomb of Horrors levels of mucking players about (and with far less excuse, since the latter was a tournament one-shot) but it does have a whiff of that. I have read some comments which question the whole premise of the latter adventure, specifically that the PCs are under-powered for such an apparently important mission. I agree, so think you should make Bolgagrad just a less important place, so the whole thing is (a bit) less of a big deal from the Kislevian authorities' point of view.

 Reviews are fairly negative in terms of SRiK's place in The Enemy Within Campaign. It is hard to dispute this although I can't say it bothered me when I played it and later when I ran it: I am okay with the idea that the world is big and there is other stuff going on, which might have been related but wasn't. At the end of PBtT, there isn't much after all to spell out that there is going to be a cataclysm, especially if the PCs were successful in it. The first time you play it, rather than read it, then SRiK feels like it might be related - Chaos strikes abroad - and just because you don't uncover it, doesn't mean it wasn't there. It depends how much metagame your GM shares, I guess (or you read it yourself). But that said, you could definitely drop it from the campaign without any loss whatsoever. 

Anyway, there are a ton of good ideas in it which are fairly easily recoverable from the more annoying aspects (adversarial tone, unkillable NPC nonsense), so it is good fun to run and play. 

There is a great review here on Ill Met By Morrslieb.