[OSSR]Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st Edition)
Moderator: Moderators
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
Ah, I played lots of WFRP; even won a GM competition at GenCon.
Combat is brutal and bloody, and elves basically RULE for characters, but there are some details.
That "one less fate point" at character creation made considerable difference; lots of elf PCs died.
"Dodge blow" is awesome, especially for high Initiative characters like elves. While there are ridiculously tough monsters in the game, in the *adventures* most things you meet only have 1 or 2 attacks a round. Having a very credible chance of negating 1 attack is pretty damn good.
It's pretty trivial to have a toughness 4 character. Dwarves have a credible chance of starting the game with a toughness of 5, and a small chance of starting with 6...you can get to 6 if you put effort into it, at least as a dwarf. You can pick up a shield VERY cheap, and that basically adds 1 toughness. You can put together a decent suit of chain mail (note: the best armor is plate), without much effort.
This basically gives you an effective toughness of 8. Considering most opponents you face will roll 3 (strength) + 6, and need to break 8 to wound you, a dwarf player that puts any effort into min/maxing will be extraordinarily hard to kill.
As a side note, it's a bit easier to "strike to stun" and then kill such a dwarf, rather than try to run the dwarf out of hit points.
But yeah, this game had serious design flaws...and awesome adventures.
Combat is brutal and bloody, and elves basically RULE for characters, but there are some details.
That "one less fate point" at character creation made considerable difference; lots of elf PCs died.
"Dodge blow" is awesome, especially for high Initiative characters like elves. While there are ridiculously tough monsters in the game, in the *adventures* most things you meet only have 1 or 2 attacks a round. Having a very credible chance of negating 1 attack is pretty damn good.
It's pretty trivial to have a toughness 4 character. Dwarves have a credible chance of starting the game with a toughness of 5, and a small chance of starting with 6...you can get to 6 if you put effort into it, at least as a dwarf. You can pick up a shield VERY cheap, and that basically adds 1 toughness. You can put together a decent suit of chain mail (note: the best armor is plate), without much effort.
This basically gives you an effective toughness of 8. Considering most opponents you face will roll 3 (strength) + 6, and need to break 8 to wound you, a dwarf player that puts any effort into min/maxing will be extraordinarily hard to kill.
As a side note, it's a bit easier to "strike to stun" and then kill such a dwarf, rather than try to run the dwarf out of hit points.
But yeah, this game had serious design flaws...and awesome adventures.
Last edited by Doom on Fri Nov 29, 2013 3:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Kaelik, to Tzor wrote: And you aren't shot in the face?
Frank Trollman wrote:A government is also immortal ...On the plus side, once the United Kingdom is no longer united, the United States of America will be the oldest country in the world. USA!
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
Section 7:
The World Guide
It was reasonably standard practice back in the 70s and 80s to have fantasy worlds be recognizable pastiches of Europe. It's just easier to do that than it is to make up your own stuff, and it saves you a lot of explanatory text to be able to say “These guys are basically Norse” than it does to have to describe clothing, food, shelter, and all those ephemeral anthropological concepts for all your made-up peoples. Not every world builder is Tolkien, and not everyone wants to sit around writing songs in made up languages for every fictional tribe in their fictional world.
Still, Warhammer is rather lazier and more egregious about it than most. And in the 80s they were pretty extreme. Most places don't even have a radical misspelling of an Earth locations. Gygax called his planet “Oerth,” but Warhammer can't be fucked to even do that. Their version of the Island of Albion (that's the name of the island that England is on) is called... Albion. Seriously, they just looked back and found some modestly obscure names for real world places and decided that was good enough. The game's Arabs are called Arabs, the game's Norse are called Norse. It comes off as very lazy. Also, more than a bit offensive in some cases.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay also didn't mince any bones about the dim distant past of the setting: the Old Slaan built warp gates at the poles, brought in the Elves, and then there was a multicolored explosion and suddenly you had the Chaos Wastes. While the history has gotten more shadowy, detailed, and convoluted over the years, the basic history of the Warhammer Fantasy setting hasn't substantially changed since then.
While the Empire has stayed mostly constant over the years, the areas outside have been almost wholly scrapped and replaced over the editions. Lustria is now a Central America themed jungle full of lizards wearing feathers. But in 1986, it was an African themed jungle full of Amazons and Pygmies. And I don't just mean “tribes of women warriors and small people,” I mean they were actually called Amazons and Pygmies. And the Pygmies had dark skin and big lips. Like, crazy big lips. I guess it's a lot funnier if you think “Black people look funny” is an appropriate punchline to a joke. It was actually pretty racist.
Of course, the Lizardmen are wholly unrecognizable from their 1986 origins in their Warhammer Fantasy Meso-American version. Here in Warhammer Fantasy Battle, they live in the deep tunnels under the Goblin caves in the “Darklands” which are essentially Black Ruthenia. In short, they are AD&D Troglodytes, who live on deeper levels of dungeons. This sort of AD&D thinking crops up a lot in this book, but it's hard to see how you could survive a proper dungeon crawl in a system this lethal.
Old Lizardmen
New Lizardmen
Of course, part of it is that the setting was not particularly designed for dungeon-delving at all - this was still roleplaying in a world of Fantasy Battles, and 90% of the setting seems to be focused on setting up conflicts along racial and national lines, with the occasional excuse for a civil war here and there.
I've mentioned before that the whole setting has a sort of Robert E. Howard historical hodge-podge feel, and this is more apparent in this section than any other. The Empire and Dwarves are on the gunpowder/Renaissance historical axis, with steampunk tanks and cannon, while Bretonnia is all about chivalry and knights in heavy armor, the Ogre Kingdoms are set in Mad Max era (Hulk flavor), and Elves do the typical Tolkiensian High Fantasy thing. We won't even get into Estalia and Tilea.
The history section begins “Ten thousand years ago...” and you already know you aren't going to give an actual fuck about any of this. You really aren't. It starts with the damn ice age, wanders around with Old Slaan, and takes quite a while to get to the damn point. You may remember back in Chapter 5 when I admitted that I couldn't remember how long it took them to abandon the plotline of humans having the ancientest culture? The answer was “two chapters.” Humans come into being some seven thousand years after this rambling history starts, after the fall of the Slaan, the rise of Chaos, the rise of the Elves, and the rise of the Dwarves, in that order. Which is odd, because two chapters earlier they straight up said that the Humans-only ancient Druidic culture predated all the other gods, but the history section puts up all the gods except the Halfling one into the mix before Humans come onto the scene.
It's very repetitive, I think four or five sections begin by telling you that Humans came on the scene three thousand years ago. The history seems to have been written a half dozenOf course, no one gives an actual fuck about what supposedly happened three thousand, five thousand, or eight thousand years before the current events in a fantasy world. It really doesn't matter at all where tribes moved from or when writing was developed or any of that shit. So this rambling, repetitive, contradictory mess is fairly pointless. It clearly wasn't edited, and I'm not sure what relevance it's supposed to have to the actual game. Several pages are given over to the different calendars of the different races, but since they all differ by even multiples of 500 years, it doesn't make anything feel remotely less stupid and contrived.
I can't throw stones. I was big on the secret history of Warhammer Fantasy for quite a long time. I even wrote articles called "Earthshaking Canon" for a Chaos Dwarf fanzine called Word of Hashut. Yes, my cred is massive and geeky indeed.
Anyway, Warhammer Fantasy was obviously taking a queue from The Lord of the Rings, but rather surprisingly it was not an exact copy, mainly because of the strong early science fiction emphasis which might have been stolen from Michael Moorcock. Anyway, the major joy of this chapter is that it eventually helped give birth to the most beautiful and fantastic book that Games Workshop ever put out, the glossy and colorful and gorgeous World of Warhammer.
The geography was clearly assembled over time by several people who hadn't really thought these things through. The geography section begins with an insistence that the Old World is much larger than Europe. It is however, very obviously not. It is, after all, just a map of Europe that was sketched out by a fantasy fan, so it's pretty much just Europe with less stuff in it. It's simply very hard to take them seriously when they make claims about the bigness of everything when their entire Italy knockoff (Tilea – literally just the syllables of Italy jumbled, though that's still more effort than they put into Bretonia or Albion) only encompasses some city states running from pseudo-Manchua to pseudo-Florence.
There's a little bit of fapping to how big mclargehuge everything is (though nothing like what they'd do for 40k), but it just feels tiny. Like, what if the Italian peninsula only had Tuscans in it, and no Lombards, Sicilians, or Romans – let alone Albanians, Slovenes, Corsicans, or Ocitanians. When you simplify the map, you make it feel smaller, and this map has been simplified a lot. Each region gets a writeup and a shoutout to a couple cities, but they utterly failed to provide the sense of vast scale they were going for. Even when they throw down hard numbers, it doesn't come across as big as it's clearly supposed to. The river Urskoy is almost 1000 miles long, which I think is supposed to be impressive, but of course that actually only would make it the 9th longest river in Europe. The Urskoy, by the way, drains into Marienburg, and I actually know a man from Marienburg. The Polish government calls it Malbok now.
Scale isn't an easy thing for Games Workshop, and never has been. Development of the non-Empire human nations has always been a bit sporadic - Brettonia got an entire army book and line of models, but then got ignored for a couple editions. Kislev (which is sort of Poland + Russia + Ice Magic) got a spot as an "allied contingent" to the Empire, while Estalia (Spain/Greece) and Tilea (Italy) used to be represented by various mercenary groups and...well...that's about it. Albion had a couple special characters and a campaign set there once (the prize was a Warhammer 40K Power Fist and Chainsword!)
The book spends several pages describing settlement formation, modes of transport, and languages. All reasonable world building stuff. But it's so shallow that it seems like wasted space. Like these were sections that they had typed up in skeletal form in case anyone on the design team did any research about period boats. But then no one ever did and the skeletal sections went into pasteup as-is. So it tells you shit like “a rowboat can carry six people” but not anything you'd actually care about or want to know.
Amazingly, a lot of the language names would survive throughout all editions of Warhammer Fantasy - except Gnomish, which was written out, and I'm pretty sure the Trogolodytes were written out. Coinage follows pre-decimal British values, so when you see some dark age shit like 1 Gold Crown = 20 Shillings = 240 Brass Pennies, you know where it came from - at least they left out the farthings and guineas. Later editions would add some foreign coinage in the shape of elf and dwarf coins, but this wasn't actually an improvement to the system as such.
For reasons that defy ready analysis, the “consumer guide” is in this chapter. It is where all the rules for buying cheese are (and there are surprisingly many), but it's also where all the adventuring equipment is. Some adventuring equipment got a little writeup in the gamesmaster chapter, some in the combat section, but the real equipment list comes right after the description of the “Arcane Dwarf” language in the setting chapter. No one knows why.
The actual costs for things are fairly crazy hat, with some prices lifted from D&D or Runequest and others converted to their nominally more valuable “gold crown.” But you still have weird anachronistic D&D standards like the Iron Ration (historical note: invented in 1907). The armor system is piecemeal and the way the hit locations and costs work out, you are going to be running around with a Knight's Helm and a leather jacket for quite some time. It's kind of weird.
See, only about one in six numbers on the hit location character are head hits, but the way the hit location is generated, most of the numbers that aren't head hits are also misses. An average starting human hits the head on one in four of the numbers he actually hits on. It takes a really skilled dude to have much of a chance of tagging you in the leg. As noted before, getting some good armor can make you damn near invulnerable to ordinary human warriors, but any kind of real monster will shred you in moments. There's really never a “sweet spot” for this game.
Prices are hilariously wacky, to the point that a Blunderbuss is 50 GCs, a "Rural Hovel" is 90 GCs, and an illuminated book is 350 GCs. At which point players are left debating whether it is better to raid the library and buy a village, or raid a village and buy a library.
One thing that is different from modern (or, hell, pre-modern) RPGs is that for the most part this edition doesn't care to tell you what anything does - there is no game bonus or special information regarding chickens, waterskins, flails, pot helmets, pistols, etc. Don't worry though, because they corrected that oversight in the next edition.
Of course, if you were actually expecting descriptions of these items... well, you don't get any. Because fuck you. An Iron Ration or a Goat is just what it says on the chart. I mean, you might find the terms “mantrap” or “grappling hook” to warrant a bit of extra description. But the authors of the book didn't. They laugh at your weakness for wanting to know the dimensions or game effects of a “Pouch” or “Wire Snare.” I'll bet you want to know how much area is covered by “Navigational Charts (printed)” too! That's because you are weak.
There are actual rules for forging coins, and the long and short of it is: it sucks. It takes (at least) two people, some uncommon skills, and a considerable set-up to make false coins out of crap metal, and then you have to succeed at another skill check to pass them off - with diminishing chance of success for every further transaction. No word on sweating or clipping, but I'm sure they were saving those for one of the companion books.
We mentioned before that prices are wacky, and nowhere is that clearer than the prices for hirelings. Hirelings on their first careers are expected to get GC20 per day - and anybody on their 2nd or higher careers is supposed to get actual shares!
The final bit is a discussion of hiring people. These are contradictory. The “skilled hirelings” are stupidly ridiculously expensive, and the “unskilled hirelings” are very cheap. But the unskilled hirelings include people who have skills. So I don't know what the fuck. I think the idea here is that it's supposed to be easy for the GM to crank up the cost of using hired swords to stupid levels to make the players fight their own battles.
And that's the bulk of the book. We've gone from insane character creation to a paper-thin gazetteer of the Known World and finish it up on page 298 with a bunch of price lists of shit-that-kills-people to know-wonder-I-can't-get-a-job-in-this-economy-look-at-the-prices. However, there are still 70 pages left in this tome, and by Tzeentch we are going to do them all.
The World Guide
FrankT:
It was reasonably standard practice back in the 70s and 80s to have fantasy worlds be recognizable pastiches of Europe. It's just easier to do that than it is to make up your own stuff, and it saves you a lot of explanatory text to be able to say “These guys are basically Norse” than it does to have to describe clothing, food, shelter, and all those ephemeral anthropological concepts for all your made-up peoples. Not every world builder is Tolkien, and not everyone wants to sit around writing songs in made up languages for every fictional tribe in their fictional world.
Still, Warhammer is rather lazier and more egregious about it than most. And in the 80s they were pretty extreme. Most places don't even have a radical misspelling of an Earth locations. Gygax called his planet “Oerth,” but Warhammer can't be fucked to even do that. Their version of the Island of Albion (that's the name of the island that England is on) is called... Albion. Seriously, they just looked back and found some modestly obscure names for real world places and decided that was good enough. The game's Arabs are called Arabs, the game's Norse are called Norse. It comes off as very lazy. Also, more than a bit offensive in some cases.
AncientH:
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay also didn't mince any bones about the dim distant past of the setting: the Old Slaan built warp gates at the poles, brought in the Elves, and then there was a multicolored explosion and suddenly you had the Chaos Wastes. While the history has gotten more shadowy, detailed, and convoluted over the years, the basic history of the Warhammer Fantasy setting hasn't substantially changed since then.
FrankT:
While the Empire has stayed mostly constant over the years, the areas outside have been almost wholly scrapped and replaced over the editions. Lustria is now a Central America themed jungle full of lizards wearing feathers. But in 1986, it was an African themed jungle full of Amazons and Pygmies. And I don't just mean “tribes of women warriors and small people,” I mean they were actually called Amazons and Pygmies. And the Pygmies had dark skin and big lips. Like, crazy big lips. I guess it's a lot funnier if you think “Black people look funny” is an appropriate punchline to a joke. It was actually pretty racist.
Of course, the Lizardmen are wholly unrecognizable from their 1986 origins in their Warhammer Fantasy Meso-American version. Here in Warhammer Fantasy Battle, they live in the deep tunnels under the Goblin caves in the “Darklands” which are essentially Black Ruthenia. In short, they are AD&D Troglodytes, who live on deeper levels of dungeons. This sort of AD&D thinking crops up a lot in this book, but it's hard to see how you could survive a proper dungeon crawl in a system this lethal.
Old Lizardmen
New Lizardmen
AncientH:
Of course, part of it is that the setting was not particularly designed for dungeon-delving at all - this was still roleplaying in a world of Fantasy Battles, and 90% of the setting seems to be focused on setting up conflicts along racial and national lines, with the occasional excuse for a civil war here and there.
I've mentioned before that the whole setting has a sort of Robert E. Howard historical hodge-podge feel, and this is more apparent in this section than any other. The Empire and Dwarves are on the gunpowder/Renaissance historical axis, with steampunk tanks and cannon, while Bretonnia is all about chivalry and knights in heavy armor, the Ogre Kingdoms are set in Mad Max era (Hulk flavor), and Elves do the typical Tolkiensian High Fantasy thing. We won't even get into Estalia and Tilea.
FrankT:
The history section begins “Ten thousand years ago...” and you already know you aren't going to give an actual fuck about any of this. You really aren't. It starts with the damn ice age, wanders around with Old Slaan, and takes quite a while to get to the damn point. You may remember back in Chapter 5 when I admitted that I couldn't remember how long it took them to abandon the plotline of humans having the ancientest culture? The answer was “two chapters.” Humans come into being some seven thousand years after this rambling history starts, after the fall of the Slaan, the rise of Chaos, the rise of the Elves, and the rise of the Dwarves, in that order. Which is odd, because two chapters earlier they straight up said that the Humans-only ancient Druidic culture predated all the other gods, but the history section puts up all the gods except the Halfling one into the mix before Humans come onto the scene.
It's very repetitive, I think four or five sections begin by telling you that Humans came on the scene three thousand years ago. The history seems to have been written a half dozenOf course, no one gives an actual fuck about what supposedly happened three thousand, five thousand, or eight thousand years before the current events in a fantasy world. It really doesn't matter at all where tribes moved from or when writing was developed or any of that shit. So this rambling, repetitive, contradictory mess is fairly pointless. It clearly wasn't edited, and I'm not sure what relevance it's supposed to have to the actual game. Several pages are given over to the different calendars of the different races, but since they all differ by even multiples of 500 years, it doesn't make anything feel remotely less stupid and contrived.
AncientH:
I can't throw stones. I was big on the secret history of Warhammer Fantasy for quite a long time. I even wrote articles called "Earthshaking Canon" for a Chaos Dwarf fanzine called Word of Hashut. Yes, my cred is massive and geeky indeed.
Anyway, Warhammer Fantasy was obviously taking a queue from The Lord of the Rings, but rather surprisingly it was not an exact copy, mainly because of the strong early science fiction emphasis which might have been stolen from Michael Moorcock. Anyway, the major joy of this chapter is that it eventually helped give birth to the most beautiful and fantastic book that Games Workshop ever put out, the glossy and colorful and gorgeous World of Warhammer.
FrankT:
The geography was clearly assembled over time by several people who hadn't really thought these things through. The geography section begins with an insistence that the Old World is much larger than Europe. It is however, very obviously not. It is, after all, just a map of Europe that was sketched out by a fantasy fan, so it's pretty much just Europe with less stuff in it. It's simply very hard to take them seriously when they make claims about the bigness of everything when their entire Italy knockoff (Tilea – literally just the syllables of Italy jumbled, though that's still more effort than they put into Bretonia or Albion) only encompasses some city states running from pseudo-Manchua to pseudo-Florence.
There's a little bit of fapping to how big mclargehuge everything is (though nothing like what they'd do for 40k), but it just feels tiny. Like, what if the Italian peninsula only had Tuscans in it, and no Lombards, Sicilians, or Romans – let alone Albanians, Slovenes, Corsicans, or Ocitanians. When you simplify the map, you make it feel smaller, and this map has been simplified a lot. Each region gets a writeup and a shoutout to a couple cities, but they utterly failed to provide the sense of vast scale they were going for. Even when they throw down hard numbers, it doesn't come across as big as it's clearly supposed to. The river Urskoy is almost 1000 miles long, which I think is supposed to be impressive, but of course that actually only would make it the 9th longest river in Europe. The Urskoy, by the way, drains into Marienburg, and I actually know a man from Marienburg. The Polish government calls it Malbok now.
AncientH:
Scale isn't an easy thing for Games Workshop, and never has been. Development of the non-Empire human nations has always been a bit sporadic - Brettonia got an entire army book and line of models, but then got ignored for a couple editions. Kislev (which is sort of Poland + Russia + Ice Magic) got a spot as an "allied contingent" to the Empire, while Estalia (Spain/Greece) and Tilea (Italy) used to be represented by various mercenary groups and...well...that's about it. Albion had a couple special characters and a campaign set there once (the prize was a Warhammer 40K Power Fist and Chainsword!)
FrankT:
The book spends several pages describing settlement formation, modes of transport, and languages. All reasonable world building stuff. But it's so shallow that it seems like wasted space. Like these were sections that they had typed up in skeletal form in case anyone on the design team did any research about period boats. But then no one ever did and the skeletal sections went into pasteup as-is. So it tells you shit like “a rowboat can carry six people” but not anything you'd actually care about or want to know.
AncientH:
Amazingly, a lot of the language names would survive throughout all editions of Warhammer Fantasy - except Gnomish, which was written out, and I'm pretty sure the Trogolodytes were written out. Coinage follows pre-decimal British values, so when you see some dark age shit like 1 Gold Crown = 20 Shillings = 240 Brass Pennies, you know where it came from - at least they left out the farthings and guineas. Later editions would add some foreign coinage in the shape of elf and dwarf coins, but this wasn't actually an improvement to the system as such.
FrankT:
For reasons that defy ready analysis, the “consumer guide” is in this chapter. It is where all the rules for buying cheese are (and there are surprisingly many), but it's also where all the adventuring equipment is. Some adventuring equipment got a little writeup in the gamesmaster chapter, some in the combat section, but the real equipment list comes right after the description of the “Arcane Dwarf” language in the setting chapter. No one knows why.
The actual costs for things are fairly crazy hat, with some prices lifted from D&D or Runequest and others converted to their nominally more valuable “gold crown.” But you still have weird anachronistic D&D standards like the Iron Ration (historical note: invented in 1907). The armor system is piecemeal and the way the hit locations and costs work out, you are going to be running around with a Knight's Helm and a leather jacket for quite some time. It's kind of weird.
See, only about one in six numbers on the hit location character are head hits, but the way the hit location is generated, most of the numbers that aren't head hits are also misses. An average starting human hits the head on one in four of the numbers he actually hits on. It takes a really skilled dude to have much of a chance of tagging you in the leg. As noted before, getting some good armor can make you damn near invulnerable to ordinary human warriors, but any kind of real monster will shred you in moments. There's really never a “sweet spot” for this game.
AncientH:
Prices are hilariously wacky, to the point that a Blunderbuss is 50 GCs, a "Rural Hovel" is 90 GCs, and an illuminated book is 350 GCs. At which point players are left debating whether it is better to raid the library and buy a village, or raid a village and buy a library.
One thing that is different from modern (or, hell, pre-modern) RPGs is that for the most part this edition doesn't care to tell you what anything does - there is no game bonus or special information regarding chickens, waterskins, flails, pot helmets, pistols, etc. Don't worry though, because they corrected that oversight in the next edition.
FrankT:
Of course, if you were actually expecting descriptions of these items... well, you don't get any. Because fuck you. An Iron Ration or a Goat is just what it says on the chart. I mean, you might find the terms “mantrap” or “grappling hook” to warrant a bit of extra description. But the authors of the book didn't. They laugh at your weakness for wanting to know the dimensions or game effects of a “Pouch” or “Wire Snare.” I'll bet you want to know how much area is covered by “Navigational Charts (printed)” too! That's because you are weak.
AncientH:
There are actual rules for forging coins, and the long and short of it is: it sucks. It takes (at least) two people, some uncommon skills, and a considerable set-up to make false coins out of crap metal, and then you have to succeed at another skill check to pass them off - with diminishing chance of success for every further transaction. No word on sweating or clipping, but I'm sure they were saving those for one of the companion books.
We mentioned before that prices are wacky, and nowhere is that clearer than the prices for hirelings. Hirelings on their first careers are expected to get GC20 per day - and anybody on their 2nd or higher careers is supposed to get actual shares!
FrankT:
The final bit is a discussion of hiring people. These are contradictory. The “skilled hirelings” are stupidly ridiculously expensive, and the “unskilled hirelings” are very cheap. But the unskilled hirelings include people who have skills. So I don't know what the fuck. I think the idea here is that it's supposed to be easy for the GM to crank up the cost of using hired swords to stupid levels to make the players fight their own battles.
AncientH:
And that's the bulk of the book. We've gone from insane character creation to a paper-thin gazetteer of the Known World and finish it up on page 298 with a bunch of price lists of shit-that-kills-people to know-wonder-I-can't-get-a-job-in-this-economy-look-at-the-prices. However, there are still 70 pages left in this tome, and by Tzeentch we are going to do them all.
Last edited by Ancient History on Sat Nov 30, 2013 9:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Chaos Dwarves had their own fanzine? Wonders will never cease.Ancient History wrote:I even wrote articles called "Earthshaking Canon" for a Chaos Dwarf fanzine called Word of Hashut.
Isn't that the modus operandi of most fantasy when you get down to it? Tolkien has The Shire, Game of Thrones is set on Not-England with Not-Scotland to the North blocked off by a big wall, and just look at any of the nations in Dominions.FrankTrollman wrote:Seriously, they just looked back and found some modestly obscure names for real world places and decided that was good enough.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
Section 8:
The Oldenhaller Contract
This is Councilor Oldenhaller, and this adventure features him somewhat.
Many games in the eighties featured a prepackaged adventure in them. Mostly, these were very simple affairs. Shadowrun had a simple shootout in a grocery store, Champions 4th edition had a dustup with some Mexican villains, and so on. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's sample adventure is more famous than most, both because it tied into a big campaign and because this book remained the core book's only edition for nineteen fucking years. So anyone who has ever played WFRP has probably played at least part of the Oldenhaller Contract, possibly more than once.
The section begins by telling you what you'll need to play, which includes some dice and a pencil and such. The book has now told you three times that you need some d4s, some d6s, and some d10s to play. Some of this is doubtless the lack of editorial control when work is being put together with typewriters and pasteboards by a group of people over months and years, and some of it is just that this adventure was probably considered for being a stand alone product at one point. In any case, the adventure comes with four pregenerated characters and suggests you use them rather than take the time to generate new characters. This was standard practice in the mid-eighties, but it really underscores the different thought processes that went into games of this period. Rolling up a WFRP character takes a couple of minutes and involves very few choices, but even that was considered to be more time than a player would want to spend. Today, games like 4th edition D&D and 5th edition Shadowrun don't even have a procedural character generation option, and you're expected to spend points and choose things off lists for even one-shot games. And they don't even really pretend that there are pregenerated characters that would be reasonable to use.
You get one pregenerated character of each race, and as far as I can tell it's basically there to rub your nose in how shitty humans are. The Elf is a fricking Wizard's Apprentice, the Dwarf is a god damned Troll Slayer, and the Human is a Hunter. The Elf and Dwarf both have real careers that go on to real things where they can be genuine wizards and warriors. The Human is a Hunter. Their only advanced career option is “Scout.” And that's a career whose only real calling is that at least you can get to some interesting places from there (Outlaw Chief, Mercenary Captain, and Explorer). But remember: the wizard's apprentice is better with both axe and bow than the hunter, because elves are better than you. The only reason the Elf academic isn't essentially the best melee user in the party is that she starts with a dagger. The moment she gets even a club, the Human is outshined in his core competencies.
It's hard to emphasize how important the campaigns were for WFRP 1st edition, because there were not many of them (Enemy Within and Doomstones are the big ones), and they essentially dominated a lot of the official and unofficial material put out for the game for the entirety of the edition. Seriously, you'd run across a WFRP scenario in White Dwarf and there would be copious space dedicated to how you could work this in to the Enemy Within campaign, usually as a prequel, sidequest, or interqual of some sort. I suppose the bonus being that your characters were so unlikely to survive the campaigns and the publishing schedule for Doomstones being so fucking long that the chances of you ever finishing were slim - and by the time you were done, you were probably ready to roll up new characters and do it all over again.
Fun fact: the White Dwarf is an actual character for WFB. They also had a Chaos Dwarf character called 'The Black Dwarf,' but he didn't survive the one scenario he was featured in.
Anyway, a word as to the plot of The Oldenhaller Contract: there isn't much of one. Your gang of adventurers arrives in the city of Nuln, and immediately get treated like you've stepped into a 1983 video game, where you're expected to explore every available room until the time counter clicks down to the next pre-generated decision-tree event. It's not too dissimilar to early Shadowrun adventures, albeit seemingly borrowing more from adventure gamebooks of the period than is healthy and in a highly condensed format.
The point of the adventure is to get the PCs to meet up with Oldenhaller, a shady merchant-politician who expected to take possession of a gem from a gang of thieves, but they have failed to make delivery. Which essentially makes the PCs repo men. Turns out the first gang of thieves was wiped out by a rival gang, and the PCs need to deal with the this new group...ha, I kid, they're supposed to murder them all, in the process of which they end up in the sewers, and then a minecart, and then facing down a bunch of Nurgle cultists. Assuming any of them survive, they can return the gem to Oldenhaller for a reward, earn enough EP to get out of their crappy initial careers, and go on to their next death-defying adventure, Shadows over Bogenhafen.
Each encounter in this adventure is named an “episode” and they are numbered. Basic choices are laid out, which are sort of choose-your-own adventurish. If the team follows the footpads, go to episode 2. If the team wanders around Nuln until they get bored, go to episode 3. It's fairly linear, but there is enough branching to make it feel at least a little bit open.
Speaking of footpads, the introductory combat is against some crappy humans with leather jackets and clubs. This is actually better equipment than the players start with, frighteningly enough. They will run off after taking a total of 5 wounds between them, which could seriously happen in the first player character attack. But the game is so random for starting characters that the player characters can seriously just lose to the starting footpads. That is a thing that actually happened to some friends of mine. Starting characters don't even hit half the time even if they are “specced for melee,” and many of them can drop or even die from one good hit with a club. The footpads only hit a third of the time each, but having them all connect on the first turn is well within the realms of possibility. Before the players get any armor, which is where the adventure traditionally starts, a total party wipe is extremely plausible.
After that, you're asked to make a strength check to open the front door on an inn. Basically, this is the tutorial section, but in my own case it just reduced the whole game to basically medieval Paranoia. A flurry of misses in combat dragged out for like four rounds an essentially tutorial fight against untrained men with sticks, and then our dwarven warrior found himself failing to push open an unlocked door. It was all very sad and made me disrespect the characters. In retrospect, this section was supposed to ease you in to the mechanics of the game (this is how you make an attack roll, this is how you make a strength check, etc.), but the tasks were so lame and the characters so bad at them that it made me think of the characters in the game as retarded cartoon characters good only for slapstick. I don't think that was the intention, so I have to say the tutorial failed at its job.
To say that The Oldenhaller Contract is ambitious as a beginning module is an understatement. Aside from a bunch of players and a gamesmaster presumably all trying to master the basics of the system, this game features an elaborately plotted run across the rooftops, a fight against rats, a better-than-even chance of catching a magical disease, a night in jail, a raid on an asylum, an Indiana Jones-style trip in a minecart, and all the assholes that really want to kill you seem to have crossbows.
One of the things that characterized gaming of this era was the bizarre insistence on player telepathy. You get a room, but if you don't ask more questions about it, the GM doesn't tell you the windows are unlatched. If you don't say you latch the windows, then thieves come in through the window in the middle of the night. This is basically a training session for Gygaxian fuckery. Back in the 80s, if you didn't say you poked the ceiling with your spear, you didn't poke the ceiling with your spear. And if you didn't poke the ceiling with your spear, your character was surprised when the ceiling turned out to be a fucking manta ray and ate you.
This meant that veteran D&D players developed routines for investigating new rooms that involved tossing rocks, poking things with poles, and throwing handfuls of flour before even setting foot inside the doorway. Kind of neat in a way, but when it comes down to it, this was all time consuming bullshit. And WFRP was doing their level best to encourage the same kinds of behavior, which was a huge mistake. The actual adventure is on a notice board in the morning, and there is a damn lot of time that can be wasted before getting there. Specifically, it's the third job on the notice board, and the other two are just dead ends to waste your time. If the players decide that they are being trolled by the notice board and give up after the first or second piece of bullshit, I guess the adventure is over. It's really not an exquisitely designed hook to get you into the adventure proper, and the players can just miss it.
The maps are fairly typical hand-drawn black outlines on graphing paper, full-pagers, and there are four of them. I told you this was an ambitious adventure, didn't I?
Each of the locations you get sent to is in essence a small “instance dungeon.” There's no indication that the Asylum even exists until you get sent there by Oldenhaller, no indication that the sewers are large enough to walk around in until you get the plans, and seemingly no cove until you get there by mine cart. Once you leave areas, they are removed from play completely – tunnels blow up behind you and shit. These places are so inaccessible without following the script of the adventure that they might as well be written into computer code.
That being said, the basic dungeon crawl scenarios they send you through are in fact horrendously deadly in this game. The starting characters basically aren't better than random guards. And when the adventure tries to get you to run move from one area to another because there's a rat swarm... rat swarms get ten fucking attacks! Ten! They are only Strength 1, but to Toughness 3 characters, that's an average of a bit over five wounds per round. The sample PCs only start with 6. Basically, if the gamesmaster doesn't tell the players right away that they have no fucking chance in the world against a rat swarm and need to start running, they have a very good chance of just getting TPKed by that shit. Of course, the players should have learned by then just how amazingly incompetent their characters are, so when it comes to an actually dangerous sounding monster like a rat swarm, they should already be running.
Thinking outside the box isn't discouraged as much as completely absent from the general logic. For example, the rat swarm would probably go down to a judicious gunpowder bomb and a few flasks of burning oil...maybe. I think in part the whole "let's not give individual monsters XP values" was supposed to encourage the occasional running away, but I don't think I've ever seen player characters run away when obviously outgunned. Ever.
The finale of the adventure has basically nothing at all to do with the characters in any way. There are seven gangsters who you can get to fight the seven cultists. The leader of the gangsters is literally and specifically worth more than any two of the PCs. The cultists are trying to summon a Beast of Nurgle, which is tougher than all the PCs combined, and they will either have successfully summoned it or not when the PCs show up based on how the GM is feeling vis a vis how much time has been wasted. Remember that in the prologue to the adventure, the tutorial kicks you in the teeth if you don't play a game of twenty questions about every little thing, so I'm guessing that most teams show up with the beast of nurgle already in the house.
Beast of Nurgle
Carrion Crawler
The Beast gets a d6 attacks every turn and is Toughness 5 with 15 wounds. Each of their attacks forces a save versus paralysis which none of the sample characters will pass even half the time. It's basically an AD&D Carrion Crawler, and it will kick your ass. The players could potentially win this fight, but largely they would do it by having NPCs do most of the fighting for them. The climactic battle is, in short, the tale of the GM banging action figures together making “pew pew” noises. The influence the PCs have over the proceedings is minimal.
And remember, the PCs all get a chance of contracting Nurgle's Rot, which makes their dick rot off turns them into a plague-bearer/minor daemon. Which is a really dick end to the adventure, even if you "win."
The adventure pays out pretty well. Two advances and 100 GC each, plus the fact that even footpads and cultists start better equipped for adventuring than you do. It's quite a haul once you Greyhawk everything. Of course, there are also several ways in this adventure to contract “nurgle's rot,” which is a special disease that is invariably fatal and totally incurable. So the chances that you have to scrap the entire party and start over again in the next adventure with new characters is pretty high.
The character sheets at the end were, hilariously, all filled out by hand and include small character portraits of Bianca (wood elf wizard's apprentice), Jodri (dwarf troll slayer), Mellory (human hunter), and Soho (halfling thief-burglar). They're hilariously sparse - the elf has a dagger, ordinary clothes, and 5 GC, and is ready to start some shit.
Amazingly, the book is still not finished. There's another 40 pages of appendices to this thing! I told you it was a beast.
The Oldenhaller Contract
This is Councilor Oldenhaller, and this adventure features him somewhat.
FrankT:
Many games in the eighties featured a prepackaged adventure in them. Mostly, these were very simple affairs. Shadowrun had a simple shootout in a grocery store, Champions 4th edition had a dustup with some Mexican villains, and so on. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's sample adventure is more famous than most, both because it tied into a big campaign and because this book remained the core book's only edition for nineteen fucking years. So anyone who has ever played WFRP has probably played at least part of the Oldenhaller Contract, possibly more than once.
The section begins by telling you what you'll need to play, which includes some dice and a pencil and such. The book has now told you three times that you need some d4s, some d6s, and some d10s to play. Some of this is doubtless the lack of editorial control when work is being put together with typewriters and pasteboards by a group of people over months and years, and some of it is just that this adventure was probably considered for being a stand alone product at one point. In any case, the adventure comes with four pregenerated characters and suggests you use them rather than take the time to generate new characters. This was standard practice in the mid-eighties, but it really underscores the different thought processes that went into games of this period. Rolling up a WFRP character takes a couple of minutes and involves very few choices, but even that was considered to be more time than a player would want to spend. Today, games like 4th edition D&D and 5th edition Shadowrun don't even have a procedural character generation option, and you're expected to spend points and choose things off lists for even one-shot games. And they don't even really pretend that there are pregenerated characters that would be reasonable to use.
You get one pregenerated character of each race, and as far as I can tell it's basically there to rub your nose in how shitty humans are. The Elf is a fricking Wizard's Apprentice, the Dwarf is a god damned Troll Slayer, and the Human is a Hunter. The Elf and Dwarf both have real careers that go on to real things where they can be genuine wizards and warriors. The Human is a Hunter. Their only advanced career option is “Scout.” And that's a career whose only real calling is that at least you can get to some interesting places from there (Outlaw Chief, Mercenary Captain, and Explorer). But remember: the wizard's apprentice is better with both axe and bow than the hunter, because elves are better than you. The only reason the Elf academic isn't essentially the best melee user in the party is that she starts with a dagger. The moment she gets even a club, the Human is outshined in his core competencies.
AncientH:
It's hard to emphasize how important the campaigns were for WFRP 1st edition, because there were not many of them (Enemy Within and Doomstones are the big ones), and they essentially dominated a lot of the official and unofficial material put out for the game for the entirety of the edition. Seriously, you'd run across a WFRP scenario in White Dwarf and there would be copious space dedicated to how you could work this in to the Enemy Within campaign, usually as a prequel, sidequest, or interqual of some sort. I suppose the bonus being that your characters were so unlikely to survive the campaigns and the publishing schedule for Doomstones being so fucking long that the chances of you ever finishing were slim - and by the time you were done, you were probably ready to roll up new characters and do it all over again.
Fun fact: the White Dwarf is an actual character for WFB. They also had a Chaos Dwarf character called 'The Black Dwarf,' but he didn't survive the one scenario he was featured in.
Anyway, a word as to the plot of The Oldenhaller Contract: there isn't much of one. Your gang of adventurers arrives in the city of Nuln, and immediately get treated like you've stepped into a 1983 video game, where you're expected to explore every available room until the time counter clicks down to the next pre-generated decision-tree event. It's not too dissimilar to early Shadowrun adventures, albeit seemingly borrowing more from adventure gamebooks of the period than is healthy and in a highly condensed format.
The point of the adventure is to get the PCs to meet up with Oldenhaller, a shady merchant-politician who expected to take possession of a gem from a gang of thieves, but they have failed to make delivery. Which essentially makes the PCs repo men. Turns out the first gang of thieves was wiped out by a rival gang, and the PCs need to deal with the this new group...ha, I kid, they're supposed to murder them all, in the process of which they end up in the sewers, and then a minecart, and then facing down a bunch of Nurgle cultists. Assuming any of them survive, they can return the gem to Oldenhaller for a reward, earn enough EP to get out of their crappy initial careers, and go on to their next death-defying adventure, Shadows over Bogenhafen.
FrankT:
Each encounter in this adventure is named an “episode” and they are numbered. Basic choices are laid out, which are sort of choose-your-own adventurish. If the team follows the footpads, go to episode 2. If the team wanders around Nuln until they get bored, go to episode 3. It's fairly linear, but there is enough branching to make it feel at least a little bit open.
Speaking of footpads, the introductory combat is against some crappy humans with leather jackets and clubs. This is actually better equipment than the players start with, frighteningly enough. They will run off after taking a total of 5 wounds between them, which could seriously happen in the first player character attack. But the game is so random for starting characters that the player characters can seriously just lose to the starting footpads. That is a thing that actually happened to some friends of mine. Starting characters don't even hit half the time even if they are “specced for melee,” and many of them can drop or even die from one good hit with a club. The footpads only hit a third of the time each, but having them all connect on the first turn is well within the realms of possibility. Before the players get any armor, which is where the adventure traditionally starts, a total party wipe is extremely plausible.
After that, you're asked to make a strength check to open the front door on an inn. Basically, this is the tutorial section, but in my own case it just reduced the whole game to basically medieval Paranoia. A flurry of misses in combat dragged out for like four rounds an essentially tutorial fight against untrained men with sticks, and then our dwarven warrior found himself failing to push open an unlocked door. It was all very sad and made me disrespect the characters. In retrospect, this section was supposed to ease you in to the mechanics of the game (this is how you make an attack roll, this is how you make a strength check, etc.), but the tasks were so lame and the characters so bad at them that it made me think of the characters in the game as retarded cartoon characters good only for slapstick. I don't think that was the intention, so I have to say the tutorial failed at its job.
AncientH:
To say that The Oldenhaller Contract is ambitious as a beginning module is an understatement. Aside from a bunch of players and a gamesmaster presumably all trying to master the basics of the system, this game features an elaborately plotted run across the rooftops, a fight against rats, a better-than-even chance of catching a magical disease, a night in jail, a raid on an asylum, an Indiana Jones-style trip in a minecart, and all the assholes that really want to kill you seem to have crossbows.
FrankT:
One of the things that characterized gaming of this era was the bizarre insistence on player telepathy. You get a room, but if you don't ask more questions about it, the GM doesn't tell you the windows are unlatched. If you don't say you latch the windows, then thieves come in through the window in the middle of the night. This is basically a training session for Gygaxian fuckery. Back in the 80s, if you didn't say you poked the ceiling with your spear, you didn't poke the ceiling with your spear. And if you didn't poke the ceiling with your spear, your character was surprised when the ceiling turned out to be a fucking manta ray and ate you.
This meant that veteran D&D players developed routines for investigating new rooms that involved tossing rocks, poking things with poles, and throwing handfuls of flour before even setting foot inside the doorway. Kind of neat in a way, but when it comes down to it, this was all time consuming bullshit. And WFRP was doing their level best to encourage the same kinds of behavior, which was a huge mistake. The actual adventure is on a notice board in the morning, and there is a damn lot of time that can be wasted before getting there. Specifically, it's the third job on the notice board, and the other two are just dead ends to waste your time. If the players decide that they are being trolled by the notice board and give up after the first or second piece of bullshit, I guess the adventure is over. It's really not an exquisitely designed hook to get you into the adventure proper, and the players can just miss it.
AncientH:
The maps are fairly typical hand-drawn black outlines on graphing paper, full-pagers, and there are four of them. I told you this was an ambitious adventure, didn't I?
FrankT:
Each of the locations you get sent to is in essence a small “instance dungeon.” There's no indication that the Asylum even exists until you get sent there by Oldenhaller, no indication that the sewers are large enough to walk around in until you get the plans, and seemingly no cove until you get there by mine cart. Once you leave areas, they are removed from play completely – tunnels blow up behind you and shit. These places are so inaccessible without following the script of the adventure that they might as well be written into computer code.
That being said, the basic dungeon crawl scenarios they send you through are in fact horrendously deadly in this game. The starting characters basically aren't better than random guards. And when the adventure tries to get you to run move from one area to another because there's a rat swarm... rat swarms get ten fucking attacks! Ten! They are only Strength 1, but to Toughness 3 characters, that's an average of a bit over five wounds per round. The sample PCs only start with 6. Basically, if the gamesmaster doesn't tell the players right away that they have no fucking chance in the world against a rat swarm and need to start running, they have a very good chance of just getting TPKed by that shit. Of course, the players should have learned by then just how amazingly incompetent their characters are, so when it comes to an actually dangerous sounding monster like a rat swarm, they should already be running.
AncientH:
Thinking outside the box isn't discouraged as much as completely absent from the general logic. For example, the rat swarm would probably go down to a judicious gunpowder bomb and a few flasks of burning oil...maybe. I think in part the whole "let's not give individual monsters XP values" was supposed to encourage the occasional running away, but I don't think I've ever seen player characters run away when obviously outgunned. Ever.
FrankT:
The finale of the adventure has basically nothing at all to do with the characters in any way. There are seven gangsters who you can get to fight the seven cultists. The leader of the gangsters is literally and specifically worth more than any two of the PCs. The cultists are trying to summon a Beast of Nurgle, which is tougher than all the PCs combined, and they will either have successfully summoned it or not when the PCs show up based on how the GM is feeling vis a vis how much time has been wasted. Remember that in the prologue to the adventure, the tutorial kicks you in the teeth if you don't play a game of twenty questions about every little thing, so I'm guessing that most teams show up with the beast of nurgle already in the house.
Beast of Nurgle
Carrion Crawler
The Beast gets a d6 attacks every turn and is Toughness 5 with 15 wounds. Each of their attacks forces a save versus paralysis which none of the sample characters will pass even half the time. It's basically an AD&D Carrion Crawler, and it will kick your ass. The players could potentially win this fight, but largely they would do it by having NPCs do most of the fighting for them. The climactic battle is, in short, the tale of the GM banging action figures together making “pew pew” noises. The influence the PCs have over the proceedings is minimal.
AncientH:
And remember, the PCs all get a chance of contracting Nurgle's Rot, which makes their dick rot off turns them into a plague-bearer/minor daemon. Which is a really dick end to the adventure, even if you "win."
FrankT:
The adventure pays out pretty well. Two advances and 100 GC each, plus the fact that even footpads and cultists start better equipped for adventuring than you do. It's quite a haul once you Greyhawk everything. Of course, there are also several ways in this adventure to contract “nurgle's rot,” which is a special disease that is invariably fatal and totally incurable. So the chances that you have to scrap the entire party and start over again in the next adventure with new characters is pretty high.
AncientH:
The character sheets at the end were, hilariously, all filled out by hand and include small character portraits of Bianca (wood elf wizard's apprentice), Jodri (dwarf troll slayer), Mellory (human hunter), and Soho (halfling thief-burglar). They're hilariously sparse - the elf has a dagger, ordinary clothes, and 5 GC, and is ready to start some shit.
Amazingly, the book is still not finished. There's another 40 pages of appendices to this thing! I told you it was a beast.
-
Lago PARANOIA
- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
Ancient History wrote:Fun fact: the White Dwarf is an actual character for WFB. They also had a Chaos Dwarf character called 'The Black Dwarf,' but he didn't survive the one scenario he was featured in.
It's commentary like this that keeps me coming back to these boards.Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
-
TheFlatline
- Prince
- Posts: 2606
- Joined: Fri Apr 30, 2010 11:43 pm
Oh fuck I remember the "trap procedure" upon entering each room back in the day. I hated that shit.
And it sticks with me. When I play a rogue I have shit like a bag of smooth stones, a bag of dirt, handfuls of flour, and all kinds of shit to try to trigger traps other than "stepping on them".
Then you had the bullshit where the trigger to the trap was more or less "whatever your character didn't think of doing". So if I sweep the area with a pole it's obviously not a tripwire, if I poke at the ground it's not a pressure plate unless the DM just arbitrarily decides *I didn't push hard enough* to fuck me...
I really, REALLY hate that. And it always seemed to be one DM in our group who always thought he was so fucking clever doing that shit. This was also the guy who hasn't run a game since he burned to the ground a Ravenloft game where he threw our level 5 party against an EL 18 encounter, with no way to avoid it and no way out, and was absolutely shocked with he TPK'd the party, then retconned and had the bad guy escape, and then nobody wanted to play any more.
And it sticks with me. When I play a rogue I have shit like a bag of smooth stones, a bag of dirt, handfuls of flour, and all kinds of shit to try to trigger traps other than "stepping on them".
Then you had the bullshit where the trigger to the trap was more or less "whatever your character didn't think of doing". So if I sweep the area with a pole it's obviously not a tripwire, if I poke at the ground it's not a pressure plate unless the DM just arbitrarily decides *I didn't push hard enough* to fuck me...
I really, REALLY hate that. And it always seemed to be one DM in our group who always thought he was so fucking clever doing that shit. This was also the guy who hasn't run a game since he burned to the ground a Ravenloft game where he threw our level 5 party against an EL 18 encounter, with no way to avoid it and no way out, and was absolutely shocked with he TPK'd the party, then retconned and had the bad guy escape, and then nobody wanted to play any more.
I never knew of Black Dwarf, but there was once an issue of WD where the title was crossed out and "BLACK GOBBO" was scribbled across it - to whore out the release of new plastic Night Goblins (and metal specialist ones including Squig Riders and the well-known Fanatics). The Black Goblin had "taken over" the magazine for most of the issue.Ancient History wrote:Fun fact: the White Dwarf is an actual character for WFB. They also had a Chaos Dwarf character called 'The Black Dwarf,' but he didn't survive the one scenario he was featured in.
I imagine if the MC lets you keep playing as the Plague Bearers, you've actually upgraded in power beyond what you could ever play normally.And remember, the PCs all get a chance of contracting Nurgle's Rot, which makes their dick rot off turns them into a plague-bearer/minor daemon. Which is a really dick end to the adventure, even if you "win."
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
I actually played Oldenhaller 2ish years ago, putting in 4e rules. I'd established 4e can't model D&D modules very well, but I was curious how well it could work with WFRP style adventure.
The players naturally were uberviolent. They thought nothing of attacking the entire gang of thieves (it all started when, clueless, a player smashed in a door and screamed "Sweet Hannah!", little realizing they were at the wrong door).
Time and again I presented opportunities for talk...but it was all smashy-smashy. There was even a Paladin in the party, and I had numerous NPC thieves cry out "we're being attacked on all sides by Chaos!"...the paladin just got ticked at being called Chaotic, rather than guess that maybe something was up with all thieves rapidly packing up their gear.
The players never made it to the mine cart, for some reason the trail of blood just wasn't hint enough.
I can't even remember the stats I gave the Beast of Nurgle, but it was like a level 4 monster (easy enough to beat if you ally with the desperate thieves, instead of cut them down like dogs...); eventually they end-arounded the thing and took out the cultists, then used the boats for a getaway, complaining at my using an unfairly strong monster.
The players naturally were uberviolent. They thought nothing of attacking the entire gang of thieves (it all started when, clueless, a player smashed in a door and screamed "Sweet Hannah!", little realizing they were at the wrong door).
Time and again I presented opportunities for talk...but it was all smashy-smashy. There was even a Paladin in the party, and I had numerous NPC thieves cry out "we're being attacked on all sides by Chaos!"...the paladin just got ticked at being called Chaotic, rather than guess that maybe something was up with all thieves rapidly packing up their gear.
The players never made it to the mine cart, for some reason the trail of blood just wasn't hint enough.
I can't even remember the stats I gave the Beast of Nurgle, but it was like a level 4 monster (easy enough to beat if you ally with the desperate thieves, instead of cut them down like dogs...); eventually they end-arounded the thing and took out the cultists, then used the boats for a getaway, complaining at my using an unfairly strong monster.
Last edited by Doom on Mon Dec 02, 2013 3:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
Kaelik, to Tzor wrote: And you aren't shot in the face?
Frank Trollman wrote:A government is also immortal ...On the plus side, once the United Kingdom is no longer united, the United States of America will be the oldest country in the world. USA!
This has possibly been my favorite OSSR. Thanks guys!
Phlebotinum : fleh-bot-ih-nuhm • A glossary of RPG/Dennizen terminology • Favorite replies: [1]
nockermensch wrote:Advantage will lead to dicepools in D&D. Remember, you read this here first!
Oh, I have. I ran through most of the Enemy Within Campaign (including the other prequel adventure in the back of the Empire Gazetteer thing). I ran it pretty much straight out of the box, and my players learned. When we got to the fucking forest spirit in Something Rotten in Kislev and it knocked down the surrounding trees, grabbed a hapless wolf and started dismembering and eating it while chatting with them (which is in its flavor text), they shut the fuck up, turned all yes, sir, no, sir, did what it wanted and got the fuck out of there.Thinking outside the box isn't discouraged as much as completely absent from the general logic. For example, the rat swarm would probably go down to a judicious gunpowder bomb and a few flasks of burning oil...maybe. I think in part the whole "let's not give individual monsters XP values" was supposed to encourage the occasional running away, but I don't think I've ever seen player characters run away when obviously outgunned. Ever.
I'm reasonably certain that the turning point came in Death of the Reik which has the potential to fling the party (around their 2nd/maybe third careers) against a full-fledged Chaos Warrior. They were unamused and scared the fuck of everything from that point on. Though I know one of them freaked the fuck out at Baron Cockroach and all his many minions. But he got all disrespectful, so they swamped him, and got inside his clothes and armor. The player really didn't like my detailed description of that, but didn't randomly mouth off like a moron as much after that.
Yeah, the Black Gobbo had a short run in a sort of B&W mail order supplement (featuring releases, IIRC; but it may have been US only) and was also on their website for a while in various bits and pieces in the very early years of their web presence (back when they still had a forum, before taking that ball and going home with it; and when they honestly called their warehouse staff the 'Mail Order Trolls'). The Black Dwarf predates the BG by a fair bit, but didn't have all that much impact.Koumei wrote: I never knew of Black Dwarf, but there was once an issue of WD where the title was crossed out and "BLACK GOBBO" was scribbled across it - to whore out the release of new plastic Night Goblins (and metal specialist ones including Squig Riders and the well-known Fanatics). The Black Goblin had "taken over" the magazine for most of the issue.
Last edited by Voss on Mon Dec 02, 2013 5:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
Something Rotten was the low point of Enemy Within, by a wide, wide, margin. EVERY adventure in that book was PCs meeting uber powerful DMPC, it was pretty annoying. The players pretty much had to bend over and take it in every adventure.
Death on the Reik was cool, though...the players had a "book boat", with the mage collecting every tome they found. One day, the book boat floated into Altdorf Harbor, it's only occupant a well fed ogre, from Castle Wittgenstein...
Death on the Reik was cool, though...the players had a "book boat", with the mage collecting every tome they found. One day, the book boat floated into Altdorf Harbor, it's only occupant a well fed ogre, from Castle Wittgenstein...
Kaelik, to Tzor wrote: And you aren't shot in the face?
Frank Trollman wrote:A government is also immortal ...On the plus side, once the United Kingdom is no longer united, the United States of America will be the oldest country in the world. USA!
Something Rotten was the low point of Enemy Within, by a wide, wide, margin. EVERY adventure in that book was PCs meeting uber powerful DMPC, it was pretty annoying. The players pretty much had to bend over and take it in every adventure.
Kaelik, to Tzor wrote: And you aren't shot in the face?
Frank Trollman wrote:A government is also immortal ...On the plus side, once the United Kingdom is no longer united, the United States of America will be the oldest country in the world. USA!
I actually liked it, because the characters were fucking hilarious, and it stopped taking itself so fucking seriously. The setting intrinsically bends players over the table, so that hardly matters, but the break in the Grimdark was pretty necessary at that point, especially if the players had fucked up and failed to stop the chaos gate in Shadows (which wiped Bogenhofen off the map) or really botched the politics, mysteries and intrigues in Middenheim.Doom wrote:Something Rotten was the low point of Enemy Within, by a wide, wide, margin. EVERY adventure in that book was PCs meeting uber powerful DMPC, it was pretty annoying. The players pretty much had to bend over and take it in every adventure.
-
JigokuBosatsu
- Prince
- Posts: 2549
- Joined: Tue Aug 10, 2010 10:36 pm
- Location: The Portlands, OR
- Contact:
Plague Bearers, oh yeah. Bolt Thrower knew what was up.Koumei wrote:
I imagine if the MC lets you keep playing as the Plague Bearers, you've actually upgraded in power beyond what you could ever play normally.
I'm not sure if they're talking about the process of becoming a Chaos creature or the process of trying to survive a low-level WFRP adventure.Bolt Thrower wrote:Slow painful death
Dementing your brain
The tribulation
Driving you insane
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
Unsection:
The Appendices
The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide has a lot of appendices. It has sixteen appendices, which is a lot. Some of them are long, some of them are short, but it start's at Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation, and it ends at Appendix P: Creating a Party. Some of them were downright perplexing like Appendix B: Random Terrain Generation which was a chart to determine whether you encountered plains while in the plains or mountains while in the mountains. It was fairly unlikely to go the other way, but seriously: what the hell?
Anyway, the general consensus at the time was that the end of the game book was where you put some number of short ideas that you hadn't thought of a good way to put into any of the chapters. Frankly, the actual chapters of this book are so scattershot that I suspect the actual reasoning was that stuff that wasn't done when the chapter it was supposed to go into was pasted together got to be an appendix if they got it finished before the book was ready to print. This book only has two appendices, but the second one is 28 pages long, making it longer than the combat chapter. Or maybe it isn't, because according to the table of contents, there are actually 3 appendices, despite the fact that there isn't any page break or label for where the third appendix might start in the actual text.
Appendix 1 is "Buildings of the Old World," and hang onto your hats because it really is just a bunch of mock-ups, maps, and descriptions of coaching inns, toll houses, canals, wayside shrines, farmsteads, and other random scenery you might have left over from your last game of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. This is really the kind of thing you would more expect in a minis skirmish game than a roleplaying game, but the lines between the two were fairly thin at this point. Actually, come to think of it WFB had a bunch of cardboard cut-out instant-buildings that look suspiciously like the Coaching Inn and Wayside Shrine, now that I think about it. Maybe some primitive cross-marketing here.
Probably the strangest part of Appendix 1 is the way we literally just had the “Settlement Patterns of the Old World” in the previous chapter. It was less than a page of describing where buildings might be (most of the advice is to wing it). But I genuinely don't know why the sections weren't merged. That little bit could have gone into this appendix, or the whole appendix could have gone in the World section. Either would have been less of a mess than what they actually ended up with. They end up referencing each other enough that it certainly doesn't save any time to have them spaced out by forty two pages. The eight maps they have in here are pretty random, and I suspect them of being “whatever they had already drawn up for their home campaign” with obviously the proper names pasted over with the word “typical” to make it properly generic.
Much is given over to villages, which are defined as places with a population between ten and a hundred. This does nothing whatever to remove the feeling the Warhammer world is in fact really small. Basically, if your habitations are all tiny villages with 10d10 people in them, it feels like a D&D continent, not a big planet full of stuff. And as we know, all D&D continents would fit on one planet. It doesn't even have to be a big planet.
Appendix 2 is what you get when gamemaster screens hadn't come into their own yet. In fact, I'm not sure when the first GM screen was produced - I know D&D was flogging a DM screen in 1979, and before that it was probably all just pizza boxes and carefully-constructed microforts. Anyway, this is all the crap you'd expect on a modern Mister Cavern shield - miscellaneous charts and tables from the book.
Appendix 2 is a random collection of charts from earlier in the book. They are here to... make them easier to find? Maybe? I am pretty sure most of those charts were pretty useless the first time I saw them, and without context most of them are fairly unparseable. The one where you roll a d4 to determine whether a random NPC generates their career from the Academic, Ranger, Rogue, or Warrior list is particularly puzzling. Why would you ever do that? I mean, I could see a chart that actually generated random NPC careers in demographically accurate percentages. I could see not using such a chart very often, but I could see its purpose. But what we have here is a chart that simply has you roll a d4 instead of making a simple executive decision. For shit that simple and stupid, I don't need a chart. I'm perfectly capable of flipping a damn coin when I'm feeling indecisive without check a table to see that Heads is “Yes” and Tails is “No.”
An argument could be made that the Career Summary Table is just needless repetition and fluffing at this point in the book, but I rather enjoy the theory that the appendices were compiled first and then the selected tables were copypasta'd into their correct chapters early in the book. At any point, without the various fluff the whole thing is remarkably compact - if you did use the book to stop a bullet, as long as the round ceased before the appendix I think you could still basically create characters and play the game.
According to the table of contents, the “Career Summary Table” is actually Appendix 3. It's not labeled as such in the actual table. Even the page header simply says “Career Summary Table” not not “Appendix 3.” Without looking at the table of contents, there's really no reason to believe there even is a third appendix. The Career Summary Table starts with an alphabetical listing of the basic careers, which is weird because the table “Alphabetical List of Basic Careers” was reprinted in its entirety just six pages earlier in Appendix 2: Charts and Tables. These two lists differ only in the number of columns they are presented in, and I don't know why this is happening. It's shit like this that fills 364 pages.
The careers listed here tell you what skills they provide, what career exits they have, and what careers exit to them. That last part is vital information that would have been extremely useful to have in the actual career lists. All that's missing is the stat advancements and the equipment. I don't think this book ever said what the point of the equipment lists for advanced careers even was (since the only listed game effect is that the trappings affect what equipment you start with if you start the game in that career), but that information is totally missing from this list. The stat advancements is a big deal though. Without that information, you can't actually play the class, so you still need to look it up in the chapter where it actually appears.
So each career appears in two places in the book. The main listing, which tells you almost everything you need to play the career, and the list at the back which contains about half of what you need to play it and also the incredibly vital information about how you would actually get into this career in-game. I have no idea why they didn't put all of this information in one or both places, because it really wouldn't have taken up a lot of extra space.
To support the "just fluffing shit out" theory, the last couple of pages with the Wizard careers has a lot of art filling out up to 3/4 of the page.
And that's basically the book. The last page is a character sheet. Well, the last two pages because it's 1986
and you probably aren't doing double sided photocopies. The basic sheet has a bunch of slots for spells known and crap that are totally out of place because no character is going to need any of that shit for a long long time and they might as well have a custom sheet written on lined paper at that point.
I said this before, but I'd like to repeat it because it bears mentioning: this is a deeply flawed game, and I had a great bit of fun with it. Not so much playing it, because my random characters tended to die messily and quickly, but I really enjoyed the fluff and fiction of Warhammer Fantasy. The great failing of this game is that you do not get to play a character quite as batshit insane as Gotrek Gurnisson or the High Mage Teclis, but I think that was a factor of the time - D&D wasn't particularly good at emulating The Lord of the Rings or Jack Vance's The Dying Earth either, at least not without a lot of handwaving, and like it or not WFRP 1st edition was an early RPG based primarily off D&D and RuneQuest, because that's what was available.
And, it must be said, at least in part due to the undying love of the Warhammer Fantasy fans, WFRP survived for years essentially unchanged, a dinosaur comparable to Call of Cthulhu that trundled along unevolved into the dawn of the 2000s. It would take Games Workshop taking back the property and reinventing it to reinvigorate the game - and the second edition deserves an OSSR of its own, at least the Old World Bestiary. While WFRP 1 was tremendous value for its money at the time, WFRP 2 (and later on, the bizarre WFRP 3) was and is expensive compared to its competition - but largely tried to make up for that with very high production values that matched or exceeded most of what was available on the market at that time (which is doubly impressive because they didn't just reuse a shitload of WFB art, which other companies would have jumped at). In addition, Black Industries took the opportunity to re-align the WFRP setting with the current WFB setting, letting the fimir and zoats and dwarf wizards sink (more or less) into obscurity and drawing on the extensive material now available from Black Library.
Where WFRP 2 falls short is, again, the mechanics - perhaps knowing their audience, WFRP 2 keeps a surprising amount of the WFRP 1 basic system (careers, advanced careers, etc.), but streamlines it slightly to produce a modern update and reimagining of the old system. I didn't play a lot of WFRP 1, but I did end up playing a fair bit of WFRP 2, and it was fun - if not without its flaws. Still, without WFRP 1 being the moderate success that it was - thanks largely to an incredibly devoted fanbase - it's doubtful any of Games Workshop's RPGs would have gotten off the ground.
The Appendices
FrankT:
The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide has a lot of appendices. It has sixteen appendices, which is a lot. Some of them are long, some of them are short, but it start's at Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation, and it ends at Appendix P: Creating a Party. Some of them were downright perplexing like Appendix B: Random Terrain Generation which was a chart to determine whether you encountered plains while in the plains or mountains while in the mountains. It was fairly unlikely to go the other way, but seriously: what the hell?
Anyway, the general consensus at the time was that the end of the game book was where you put some number of short ideas that you hadn't thought of a good way to put into any of the chapters. Frankly, the actual chapters of this book are so scattershot that I suspect the actual reasoning was that stuff that wasn't done when the chapter it was supposed to go into was pasted together got to be an appendix if they got it finished before the book was ready to print. This book only has two appendices, but the second one is 28 pages long, making it longer than the combat chapter. Or maybe it isn't, because according to the table of contents, there are actually 3 appendices, despite the fact that there isn't any page break or label for where the third appendix might start in the actual text.
AncientH:
Appendix 1 is "Buildings of the Old World," and hang onto your hats because it really is just a bunch of mock-ups, maps, and descriptions of coaching inns, toll houses, canals, wayside shrines, farmsteads, and other random scenery you might have left over from your last game of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. This is really the kind of thing you would more expect in a minis skirmish game than a roleplaying game, but the lines between the two were fairly thin at this point. Actually, come to think of it WFB had a bunch of cardboard cut-out instant-buildings that look suspiciously like the Coaching Inn and Wayside Shrine, now that I think about it. Maybe some primitive cross-marketing here.
FrankT:
Probably the strangest part of Appendix 1 is the way we literally just had the “Settlement Patterns of the Old World” in the previous chapter. It was less than a page of describing where buildings might be (most of the advice is to wing it). But I genuinely don't know why the sections weren't merged. That little bit could have gone into this appendix, or the whole appendix could have gone in the World section. Either would have been less of a mess than what they actually ended up with. They end up referencing each other enough that it certainly doesn't save any time to have them spaced out by forty two pages. The eight maps they have in here are pretty random, and I suspect them of being “whatever they had already drawn up for their home campaign” with obviously the proper names pasted over with the word “typical” to make it properly generic.
Much is given over to villages, which are defined as places with a population between ten and a hundred. This does nothing whatever to remove the feeling the Warhammer world is in fact really small. Basically, if your habitations are all tiny villages with 10d10 people in them, it feels like a D&D continent, not a big planet full of stuff. And as we know, all D&D continents would fit on one planet. It doesn't even have to be a big planet.
AncientH:
Appendix 2 is what you get when gamemaster screens hadn't come into their own yet. In fact, I'm not sure when the first GM screen was produced - I know D&D was flogging a DM screen in 1979, and before that it was probably all just pizza boxes and carefully-constructed microforts. Anyway, this is all the crap you'd expect on a modern Mister Cavern shield - miscellaneous charts and tables from the book.
FrankT:
Appendix 2 is a random collection of charts from earlier in the book. They are here to... make them easier to find? Maybe? I am pretty sure most of those charts were pretty useless the first time I saw them, and without context most of them are fairly unparseable. The one where you roll a d4 to determine whether a random NPC generates their career from the Academic, Ranger, Rogue, or Warrior list is particularly puzzling. Why would you ever do that? I mean, I could see a chart that actually generated random NPC careers in demographically accurate percentages. I could see not using such a chart very often, but I could see its purpose. But what we have here is a chart that simply has you roll a d4 instead of making a simple executive decision. For shit that simple and stupid, I don't need a chart. I'm perfectly capable of flipping a damn coin when I'm feeling indecisive without check a table to see that Heads is “Yes” and Tails is “No.”
AncientH:
An argument could be made that the Career Summary Table is just needless repetition and fluffing at this point in the book, but I rather enjoy the theory that the appendices were compiled first and then the selected tables were copypasta'd into their correct chapters early in the book. At any point, without the various fluff the whole thing is remarkably compact - if you did use the book to stop a bullet, as long as the round ceased before the appendix I think you could still basically create characters and play the game.
FrankT:
According to the table of contents, the “Career Summary Table” is actually Appendix 3. It's not labeled as such in the actual table. Even the page header simply says “Career Summary Table” not not “Appendix 3.” Without looking at the table of contents, there's really no reason to believe there even is a third appendix. The Career Summary Table starts with an alphabetical listing of the basic careers, which is weird because the table “Alphabetical List of Basic Careers” was reprinted in its entirety just six pages earlier in Appendix 2: Charts and Tables. These two lists differ only in the number of columns they are presented in, and I don't know why this is happening. It's shit like this that fills 364 pages.
The careers listed here tell you what skills they provide, what career exits they have, and what careers exit to them. That last part is vital information that would have been extremely useful to have in the actual career lists. All that's missing is the stat advancements and the equipment. I don't think this book ever said what the point of the equipment lists for advanced careers even was (since the only listed game effect is that the trappings affect what equipment you start with if you start the game in that career), but that information is totally missing from this list. The stat advancements is a big deal though. Without that information, you can't actually play the class, so you still need to look it up in the chapter where it actually appears.
So each career appears in two places in the book. The main listing, which tells you almost everything you need to play the career, and the list at the back which contains about half of what you need to play it and also the incredibly vital information about how you would actually get into this career in-game. I have no idea why they didn't put all of this information in one or both places, because it really wouldn't have taken up a lot of extra space.
AncientH:
To support the "just fluffing shit out" theory, the last couple of pages with the Wizard careers has a lot of art filling out up to 3/4 of the page.
FrankT:
And that's basically the book. The last page is a character sheet. Well, the last two pages because it's 1986
and you probably aren't doing double sided photocopies. The basic sheet has a bunch of slots for spells known and crap that are totally out of place because no character is going to need any of that shit for a long long time and they might as well have a custom sheet written on lined paper at that point.
AncientH:
I said this before, but I'd like to repeat it because it bears mentioning: this is a deeply flawed game, and I had a great bit of fun with it. Not so much playing it, because my random characters tended to die messily and quickly, but I really enjoyed the fluff and fiction of Warhammer Fantasy. The great failing of this game is that you do not get to play a character quite as batshit insane as Gotrek Gurnisson or the High Mage Teclis, but I think that was a factor of the time - D&D wasn't particularly good at emulating The Lord of the Rings or Jack Vance's The Dying Earth either, at least not without a lot of handwaving, and like it or not WFRP 1st edition was an early RPG based primarily off D&D and RuneQuest, because that's what was available.
And, it must be said, at least in part due to the undying love of the Warhammer Fantasy fans, WFRP survived for years essentially unchanged, a dinosaur comparable to Call of Cthulhu that trundled along unevolved into the dawn of the 2000s. It would take Games Workshop taking back the property and reinventing it to reinvigorate the game - and the second edition deserves an OSSR of its own, at least the Old World Bestiary. While WFRP 1 was tremendous value for its money at the time, WFRP 2 (and later on, the bizarre WFRP 3) was and is expensive compared to its competition - but largely tried to make up for that with very high production values that matched or exceeded most of what was available on the market at that time (which is doubly impressive because they didn't just reuse a shitload of WFB art, which other companies would have jumped at). In addition, Black Industries took the opportunity to re-align the WFRP setting with the current WFB setting, letting the fimir and zoats and dwarf wizards sink (more or less) into obscurity and drawing on the extensive material now available from Black Library.
Where WFRP 2 falls short is, again, the mechanics - perhaps knowing their audience, WFRP 2 keeps a surprising amount of the WFRP 1 basic system (careers, advanced careers, etc.), but streamlines it slightly to produce a modern update and reimagining of the old system. I didn't play a lot of WFRP 1, but I did end up playing a fair bit of WFRP 2, and it was fun - if not without its flaws. Still, without WFRP 1 being the moderate success that it was - thanks largely to an incredibly devoted fanbase - it's doubtful any of Games Workshop's RPGs would have gotten off the ground.
You know, having to literally cut and paste pieces of paper together to assemble a final book goes a long way to explaining why so many old RPG books are in some way incoherent. Given the difficulties inherent in altering stuff, it's actually kind of impressive any of them even have page citations.
Which just makes it sadder that people in the days of computers and hypertext manage to fuck up organizing books.
Which just makes it sadder that people in the days of computers and hypertext manage to fuck up organizing books.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
-
darkmaster
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 913
- Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2011 5:24 am
I don't know, playing a shit covered farmer in a world of fantasy and adventure doesn't sound particularly interesting to me.
Kaelik wrote:Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
-
RadiantPhoenix
- Prince
- Posts: 2668
- Joined: Sun Apr 11, 2010 10:33 pm
- Location: Trudging up the Hill
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
I for one think it would be wonderful if D&D and its derivatives had rules that extended down from armored soldiers of fortune to allow playable blacksmith apprentices, cooks, swineherds, and tailors. That would be good for verisimilitude, because for one thing it would mean that you could have followers and bystanders who were those things without having the rules choke. And that would be valuable even if you decided that you were never going to run a campaign of farmers and cityfolk solving mysteries with the help of a talking dog.darkmaster wrote:I don't know, playing a shit covered farmer in a world of fantasy and adventure doesn't sound particularly interesting to me.
And I'd also think it would be wonderful if D&D and its derivatives could plausibly have those characters grow up into wizards and swordsmen. In the first book of Wheel of Time the main characters are farmers and craft apprentices and shit, and that's hardly the only series to do that. Hell, the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings don't start as warriors, they start as yeomen with knowledge of beer and apples. "Peasant makes good" is a pretty fucking standard fantasy story arc, and it would be nice if it was at least possible to model such a thing in a fantasy game.
That being said, WFRP was not really on the right track with its careers. First of all, the careers weren't even a little bit balanced. Depending on your starting career you just get more or less shit. It's really up in your face about being horrendously unbalanced, well above the fact that you have to roll your stats. Secondly, some careers go on to adventuring options and some of them don't. That is bullshit. When characters kick up a tier to have actual adventuring career like Wizard and Templar, none of the PCs should be stuck gaining their journeyman certification as a potter instead. Because that is bullshit.
But perhaps most importantly: the thing where you play students, ferrymen, and poachers instead of Rangers and Necromancers is a niche, not the standard. Everyone wants to have swords and sorcery in a sword and sorcery game, and not everyone wants to play the prologue. Protector of the Small starts with First Test, and then goes on to Page, and Squire, and Lady knight is the fourth fucking book. But most sword and sorcery series are not like that. The civilian tier game should absolutely be something players are able to skip and it should be plausible to speed through it quickly. The thing where in WFRP it was supposed to be both mandatory and long was straight bullshit.
-Username17
-
darkmaster
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 913
- Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2011 5:24 am
The thing is though if you want to play through the story of your character rising to greatness, and by greatness I mean level 1 of a PC class ala Protector of the Small you can just do that. Because the Protector of the Small series is not about a lowly commoner rising to knighthood it is about gender roles and transcending societies perceptions with rising to knighthood as a framing device because while Tamora Pierce does occasionally write fantasy adventure novels such as the excellent Circle of Magic series all of her books set in Tortall are coming of age romance novels about strong women finding a place in the world. Upon last reading anyway, I admit I haven't exactly kept up with my reading in recent years so that trend might have changed in later volumes.
The point is your example of a peasant rising into an adventurer is all about social interactions and that can be a good story but it's not actually a thing that a system needs to emulate because you'd be better served just sitting down with your players and telling the story of their training if that is a story they what to tell.
And it's implied to be happening already in D&D at least classes all have starting ages. A human fighter is at minimum 16 years old and presumably you don't just pick up a sword and start stabbing goblins someone spent time while you were young to teach you the ins and outs of stabbing goblins until you were ready to strike out on your own. A rouge might have had a mentor in the thieves guild or maybe they just kept getting their teeth kicked in as a pickpocketing urchin. There ARE stories to tell there but they're not really adventures in the D&D sense of the word and you certainly don't throw characters whose class is "farmer" or "potter" into a fantasy adventure of stabbing because they die, a lot, and the player like as not keeps having to reroll characters until they get to be a class that doesn't just die when it goes adventuring.
The point is your example of a peasant rising into an adventurer is all about social interactions and that can be a good story but it's not actually a thing that a system needs to emulate because you'd be better served just sitting down with your players and telling the story of their training if that is a story they what to tell.
And it's implied to be happening already in D&D at least classes all have starting ages. A human fighter is at minimum 16 years old and presumably you don't just pick up a sword and start stabbing goblins someone spent time while you were young to teach you the ins and outs of stabbing goblins until you were ready to strike out on your own. A rouge might have had a mentor in the thieves guild or maybe they just kept getting their teeth kicked in as a pickpocketing urchin. There ARE stories to tell there but they're not really adventures in the D&D sense of the word and you certainly don't throw characters whose class is "farmer" or "potter" into a fantasy adventure of stabbing because they die, a lot, and the player like as not keeps having to reroll characters until they get to be a class that doesn't just die when it goes adventuring.
Kaelik wrote:Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
It was more strongly implied in olden days with level titles.
Cleric 1: Acolyte.
Druid 1: Aspirant.
Fighter 1: Veteran.
Ranger 1: Runner.
Paladin 1: Gallant.
Mage/Ill 1: Prestidigitator.
Thief 1: Rogue.
Assassin 1: Bravo.
Monk 1: Novice.
Most of those are words for people who have passed the early initiation and are seeking greater things. Except the Wizards, who are doing card tricks. Also mechanically there were 0-level Fighters all over the place.
Cleric 1: Acolyte.
Druid 1: Aspirant.
Fighter 1: Veteran.
Ranger 1: Runner.
Paladin 1: Gallant.
Mage/Ill 1: Prestidigitator.
Thief 1: Rogue.
Assassin 1: Bravo.
Monk 1: Novice.
Most of those are words for people who have passed the early initiation and are seeking greater things. Except the Wizards, who are doing card tricks. Also mechanically there were 0-level Fighters all over the place.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
-
darkmaster
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 913
- Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2011 5:24 am
This is true, I'm not quite to classes just yet but my review of the AD&D payers handbook will be mentioning this.
Kaelik wrote:Fuck you Haruhi is clearly the best moe anime, and we will argue about how Haruhi and Nagato are OP and um... that girl with blond hair? is for shitters.darkmaster wrote:Tgdmb.moe, like the gaming den, but we all yell at eachother about wich lucky star character is the cutest.
If you like Lucky Star then I will explain in great detail why Lucky Star is the a shitty shitty anime for shitty shitty people, and how the characters have no interesting abilities at all, and everything is poorly designed especially the skill challenges.
I've wanted/hoped for something like this for quite a while, myself.FrankTrollman wrote:I for one think it would be wonderful if D&D and its derivatives had rules that extended down from armored soldiers of fortune to allow playable blacksmith apprentices, cooks, swineherds, and tailors. That would be good for verisimilitude, because for one thing it would mean that you could have followers and bystanders who were those things without having the rules choke. And that would be valuable even if you decided that you were never going to run a campaign of farmers and cityfolk solving mysteries with the help of a talking dog.
I've wondered a few times if a 5 (or so) level sub-game could be made out of NPC classes.
Across those 5 or so levels you gain skill ranks in your profession and slowly earn your target base class's Level 1 perks.
Phlebotinum : fleh-bot-ih-nuhm • A glossary of RPG/Dennizen terminology • Favorite replies: [1]
nockermensch wrote:Advantage will lead to dicepools in D&D. Remember, you read this here first!