As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let’s not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.
WFRP isn’t meant to be “punishing” or “difficult” or whatever other term you want to come up with for “mean to the players.” No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that’s just bad GMing. You’re here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that’s not an accomplishment.
What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC’s still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is “harder” but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.
High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that’s OK. They should be able to do that, they’re a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they’ll never feel completely safe even though they’ll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.
The 40k ones that follow on Dark Heresy all play the same way as WFRP: basic attributes with most values being a 0-100 range, lots of skills to sink points in, overall same rules for combat with similar damage and critical damage chart. Mechanically, they’re all effectively the same game, changing only the kind of adventures you end up having (depressed soldiers in Only War, lawless space hijinks in Rogue Trader, spehss mareens in Deathwatch, evil corruption and worship in Black Crusade)
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I didn’t even know there were multiple. One player of my group recently ordered some rulebooks for something else and they put like a starter book light in there as well. It’s like 20 pages. Only War means you pay Guardsmen? That sounds great.
So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics:
Dark Heresy - Small teams doing investigative work for the inquisition
Rogue Trader - Run a mobile heavily armed nation state doing whatever the fuck you like in space
Deathwatch - SPESS MEHREENS
Black Crusade - CHAOS SPESS MEHREENS
Only War - You’re guardsmen, you do war stuff.
Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff.
Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they’ve given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from “You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor” to “You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron”, with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest… Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well.
It’s also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think “Feats” or “Class abilities”) as they’re kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.
Yup, I also specified Dark Heresy because there’s a newer, different 40k RPG, Wrath and Glory, that uses a very different set of mechanics and has an expansion for playing as Eldar. I can’t speak about it, haven’t taken the time to read or ever had the chance to play
As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let’s not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.
WFRP isn’t meant to be “punishing” or “difficult” or whatever other term you want to come up with for “mean to the players.” No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that’s just bad GMing. You’re here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that’s not an accomplishment.
What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC’s still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is “harder” but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.
High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that’s OK. They should be able to do that, they’re a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they’ll never feel completely safe even though they’ll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.
Just ignoring Paranoia.
Paranoia isn’t so much “mean” as it is calling your best friend “fuckface” in front of his mom.
Calling the perfect game mean is an act of treason. Please proceed to the nearest Traitor-B-Gone tube for correction.
Can you speak on the 40k system as well? Is it worth a shot?
The 40k ones that follow on Dark Heresy all play the same way as WFRP: basic attributes with most values being a 0-100 range, lots of skills to sink points in, overall same rules for combat with similar damage and critical damage chart. Mechanically, they’re all effectively the same game, changing only the kind of adventures you end up having (depressed soldiers in Only War, lawless space hijinks in Rogue Trader, spehss mareens in Deathwatch, evil corruption and worship in Black Crusade)
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I didn’t even know there were multiple. One player of my group recently ordered some rulebooks for something else and they put like a starter book light in there as well. It’s like 20 pages. Only War means you pay Guardsmen? That sounds great.
So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics:
Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff.
Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they’ve given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from “You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor” to “You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron”, with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest… Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well.
It’s also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think “Feats” or “Class abilities”) as they’re kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.
Yup, I also specified Dark Heresy because there’s a newer, different 40k RPG, Wrath and Glory, that uses a very different set of mechanics and has an expansion for playing as Eldar. I can’t speak about it, haven’t taken the time to read or ever had the chance to play