Grim and Perilous Rules To Your Advantage – Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Preview
Adventuring in the Grim and Perilous world of Warhammer Fantasy can be difficult, and if you want your heroes to survive, they’ll need to leverage every Advantage they can. Come see how some of the combat rules (including Advantage) work in WFRP 4th Edition.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s release is imminent. With summer (and GenCon) around the corner, we’re starting to see more and more about how the game will actually work. Today we’ve got a look at some of the combat rules, where we’ll cover how Cubicle 7 intends to handle the flow/pace of combat, as well as a little about Critical Hits.
via Cubicle 7
So the big concept that they preview right now is Advantage, which is their way of making sure that something happens each round of combat. Even if you miss, someone gains advantage, which is like a floating +10.
When you get into a confrontation, everyone acts in Initiative order. We’ve added in a few alternative options here for you to tailor the game to your play style. You can keep things simple and just use the Characteristic, or introduce some randomness and deploy the GM catchphrase ‘Roll for initiative’, plus several other permutations.
Every combat round you get to move and do something. The ‘something’ might be using a skill, making an attack, casting a spell, and so on. An attack isn’t meant to only represent one swing of a sword arm. It’s movement, positioning, timing, dodges, feints and parries – all the things that happen in exciting fantasy combat.
D100 systems can suffer from so-called ‘whiff factor’ – endless inaction due to everyone failing rolls time and time again. This was something we wanted to eliminate as much as possible. One of the new mechanics we introduced to help with this in combat is called Advantage. You can gain Advantage from sources including Surprise, Charging and winning an Attack Test. Each point of Advantage gives you +10 to your Attack Tests, and represents you pressing your foe back, gaining control of the space, gaining confidence, leaping onto the table, kicking sand in their face, or whatever you feel is appropriate to the battle at hand.
You can accumulate multiple points of Advantage, banking them until you either lose an Attack Test, get wounded, or the fight is over. And there are talents and spells to help you steal advantage from other people, so there’s a lot of ways to manipulate Advantage to your, well, advantage.
But it’s certainly not all one-way traffic! Adversaries have special abilities that are powered by Advantage, so can become progressively more powerful. And there’s loads of fun times for the GM in deciding when to use monster abilities, or simply keep a bonus to hit.
The GM’s enemies will have abilities that key off of Advantage. The basic mechanic is pretty simple. If you win an Attack test, you gain advantage. This works whether you’re attacking or defending. Successfully block? Advantage. Hit your target but deal no damage? You still get Advantage. Something’s always happening, the tide is always flowing.
Speaking of flowing, the other thing that’ll be flowing is blood. Once you start attacking your enemies and getting critical hits.
Critical hits are a staple of WFRP, and in Fourth Edition occur on especially successful blows, as indicated by the roll of a double. In addition to extra damage and special wounds, critical hits can inflict a variety of Conditions that change the way combat works for those who receive them.
That’s it for now. But stay tuned for more WFRP news as it develops.
Happy Adventuring!
