Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Warhammer FRP
Long long ago, before the world fell all to ruin, when Games Workshop was still a good and honourable games company, GW brought out a fantasy wargame called Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WFB). The background to this game has been described as one third Tolkien, one third Moorcock and one third history. The setting is a fantasy version of Europe, reflecting a historical period somewhere around the 14th-16th centuries.

At this point I must digress to explain my views on RPG backgrounds. When I see someone produce a new game that's completely derivative from what's gone before, as this background was, I shudder with distaste. Every time a new RPG comes out, and it has the old hackneyed fantasy races of Orcs, Elves and Dwarves in a mock-mediaeval setting with Law and Chaos in the background, I just think to myself, 'What was the fucking point in that? You might as well just play AD&D.'

But these considerations do not apply to WFB. WFB was a wargame, and when you play a wargame you don't want to spend a couple of weeks reading all the background material, which I would be quite happy to do with a roleplaying game. With a wargame, you want to be able to get to grips with the world straight away with a minimum of effort. So seeing the familiar and well-understoood races in a familiar setting is an advantage in a wargame.

WFB had a small number of stats for each individual, which were arranged into a 'Profile' making them convenient to read. Now, this is an important point: for each of the humanoid races (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, etc.) there was something called a Basic Profile which gave the stats for a typical rank-and-file soldier of that race. The Basic Profile represented a trained soldier, not an untrained peasant. By third edition you could have troops called 'levies' who were untrained peasants that had just been drafted in to fight (I'm not sure in which edition of the game these were introduced). These had stats lower than the Basic Profile.

The reason I'm telling you this is because WFB had a good game balance, which could not be broken because there were upper limits on how high a character's stats could go above the Basic Profile of his race. A basic Human had a Strength (S) of 3. The highest a Human could go was S 4. Off the top of my head, I think and Ogre had S 5, a Greater Demon S 7 and the greatest of Dragons S 10. The most powerful Human could never equal the S of an Ogre, let alone a Greater Demon or a Dragon. This is good. This is how it should be. Stats should have an upper limit to what is achievable. (See my rant on uncontrolled stat growth).

Now, finally, we get to the game I'm actually writing about, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP). GW brought this out, I think in between publishing editions 2 and 3 of WFB, as a roleplaying version of WFB. So it was set in the same world. I don't particularly like these games which just redo the standard cliched hack fantasy Orcs-Elves-Dwarves concept, but I have to say that of those I've played this is the best. It's a romping, enjoyable world of adventure, and the background is covered in more depth than most RPGs. (This is not to say that there's as much background as I'd like. Very little is said, for instance, about how society is organised or how power is exercised by rulers.)

The first big problem with WFRP is the conversion of stats from WFB to WFRP. WFB has almost all its stats in the range 1-10. WFRP has changed some of these to 1-100. At the back of the WFRP rulebook is a table showing how to convert WFB stats to WFRP stats. Some stay the same (so S 3 becomes S 3) whereas some are changed (so for Weapon Skill, WS 3 becomes WS 33).

This system falls down for two reasons. One is that the Basic Profile, which represents the stats of a trained soldier in WFB, is converted to form the stats of an untrained peasant in WFRP. To make a character who is a trained soldier, the stat increases from the Soldier career must be added to this Basic Profile. This means that an average Human peasant in WFRP has stats equivalent to a trained Human soldier in WFB, whereas a trained Human in WFRP has stats equivalent to a 'Hero' (a personality character with higher stats) in WFB. This throws the game balance out for a start, because now in WFRP all the player character races are a bit harder in comparison to NPC races than they are in WFB.

But it gets a lot worse than that. In WFB, there is a hard ceiling for each race above which its stats can not go. For Strength (S) this is 1 point above the Basic Profile. Since the S of the Basic Human Profile is 3, the absolute unbreakable maximum S value for a Human is 4. That's WFB. WFRP still has a sort of hard ceiling, but it's much higher. In WFRP, a Human's basic S is 1D3+1. In character generation, the character may gain the 'Very Strong' skill, giving +1 S, so the maximum possible so far is S 5. Above this, S may increase with experience by 'Advances'. These have a hard ceiling (I think it's +2), so that gives a Human character a maximum possible S of 7. That's the same S as a Greater Demon, which is an innately magical creature about 100 feet tall. I've just used S as an example here, but similar things happen with many stats. Basically, the carefully thought out game balance of WFB has been thrown out of the window and characters are allowed to become almost god-like in power, just like in AD&D. This was a real diasppointment to me.

THE CAREERS SYSTEM

AD&D had rigid 'charcter classes'. Some other RPGs have no such concept, allowing each character to develop freely without straitjacketing it into one stereotype. WFRP pursued a middle course with the Careers system.

The Careers system was a noble effort. A character has to take up a Career. This describes what the character is doing in his life. If a character is following the Coachman career, he has to drive a coach for a living. If he takes up the Bandit career, he has to be a do robbery with violence for a living. If he takes the Soldier career, he has to be a professional military man.

It seems that this was an attempt to make people play characters who actually had a life in the world instead of just being 'wandering fantasy adventurers' as characters are assumed to be in most fantasy RPGs. Unfortunately, this was not followed up in the game, either in the original release or in the published scenarios. Scenarios were not published for 'a group of Coachmen characters' or 'a group of characters playing a military unit'. One reason for this, of course, is that this would give any published scenario a very limited appeal. If GW produced a scenario for 'a group of PCs running a coach company in Altdorf,' or for 'a group of PCs who are a military unit in Baron Grundig's army', they wouldn't sell very many scenarios. A commercial scenario, if it's to be played with an existing group of characters, must be useable by almost any party. This works if the PCs are 'wandering fantasy adventruers' but not if they are doing a day job.

So, this noble idea didn't work because it wasn't supported. Still, it could be used to good effect by a GM determined to make his players play characters who are like real people. But often it becomes simply a useless appendage. The rules state that to go through a Career, a character has to do the job specified in that Career. So if a character wants to become a Bandit Chief, he has to hire some bandits and go around with them raiding. This is done purely as a matter of form so that the character can fulfill the requirements of the Career and gain the stat advances and skills.

Each Career has a list of skills and stat advances which can be gained while in that Career (Experience Points have to be individually paid for each of these). Each Career also has a list of 'exits' which are other Careers that the character can go into from this Career. This means that rules lawyers quickly learn which Careers give them the greatest increases in their combat stats, and then seek out the Career path that leads them to that Career.

The next problem is that there isn't a lot of sense in the stat advances that the Careers have. If I recall correctly, the Assassin Career is the only one with Attacks +3 (ie. you can increase your Attacks stat to 3 points above your character's starting level). Other advanced military Careers (Knight and Military Officer, I think) have Attacks +2, while the basic Soldier career only has Attacks +1. This means that power-gamers always try to become Assassins to get that desirable +3. But where is the sense in this? Why should someone who works as an assassin get the chance at higher combat stats than a professional fighter? And why sould an officer be able to get higher stats than an ordinary soldier? Rank should not determine skill. If two men with the same stats join the army together, have the same amount of fighting experience, and then one is promoted to a position of command and the other remains a private soldier, why should that affect the levels of combat stats which they can achieve? Why should the officer be able to get Attacks +2 but the common soldier only +1? There is no sense in it.

As mentioned, Assassins only can get +3 Attacks. Why should that be? One might answer that an assassin spends most of his time doing combat training. I answer that a professional soldier spends much of his life fighting and training, so he should be able to get just as good. A possible answer is that an assassin would be trained in secret martial arts techniques. This would be fine, but it's not in the rules. If the rules said that to enter this Career, a character had to join a secret order of assassins and be trained in its secret ways, that would be fine. But there is no such stipulation.

Like so many rules in so many game systems, the Careers system of WFRP can be a good set of guidelines but a poor set of rules. If a GM takes this system as a guide and sets aside the actual written rules in favour of common sense whenever this seems a wise judgement, then it can work fine. But if the GM just interprets the rules literally every time, they produce nonsensical results.