Whilst I love the setting and tone of the 4th Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I’m less convinced by its mechanics, particularly in combat. Fundamentally, it’s a straightforward d100 system. However, it is burdened by a plethora of modifiers to each attack roll – advantage, target size, range, conditions, ailments, psychological effects, etc. And that’s before you factor in additional influences such as weapon qualities/flaws and creature traits. The organisation of the rulebook doesn’t help, with oft-needed information scattered throughout its 300+ pages.
My regular gaming group is currently playing through “Death on the Reik” and we are thoroughly enjoying it. However, our saviour has been Moo Man’s amazing WFRP module for the Foundry Virtual Tabletop. This piece of technical wizardry automates much of the system’s complexity. Basically, for us at least, it makes the 4th edition of WFRP playable. Without it, I think we’d either have given up or house-ruled away much of the detail.
In the upcoming series of blogs, I will explore how Hack100 can be used to run adventures in the Old World without recourse to sophisticated software. The approach will be to use Hack100 alongside the source material. So we’ll keep all the stuff that makes WFRP great – the careers, the setting, the adventures, the sense of humour – and just replace the mechanics with Hack100’s flexible, light-touch approach. Hopefully, this will be the best of both worlds.
(Incidentally, at the time of writing, there’s a great WFRP offer over at Humble).