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View Full Version : So Many to Choose From (WoD, Scion, Dark Heresy, WHFRP, ASOIAFRP, Serentiy, etc)



CheshireCatAW
2009-06-01, 01:05 PM
It is the time of the year that regular players and DM's, casual and serious alike, change their schedules and migrate about the country for a few months. My group has gone through this mutation and decided since our last campaign seems to have sputtered out at this point, that it might be fun to try out a new system.

I want to know what peoples' experiences with the systems below have been like. Since most of my players will not know much about the game systems either, is there anything I (as the GM/DM/ST...) should be made aware of? Some broken mechanics that will neutralize the rest of the party if one character takes them? Or some feats/skills/etc that I should guide my players away from in order to not hurt their characters during gameplay? I would appreciate any info I could get from you on the following games.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
World of Darkness (Core or Hunter)
Scion
Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy
A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay
Serenity RPG
Savage Worlds

Thank you for your time.

Krrth
2009-06-01, 01:17 PM
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Haven't played in a long, long time. Combat is deadly. Avoid it (combat) if you can.
World of Darkness (Core or The Vigil): Fairly good. try to focus on one to the splats (vampire, werewolf, mage, changeling, hunter)at a time until you're familiar with the system.
Scion:Very limited experience.
Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy: Fun! Make sure your players like Grimdark though.
A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay: Combat is...different. Worry about fatigue, no magical healing.
Serenity RPG: no experience.

Doc Roc
2009-06-01, 01:23 PM
It's not on the list, but let me toss it into the arena.

Savage Worlds.

A friend of mine ran five major encounters in four hours. That's a pretty fair advertisement in my opinion. While I'll run anything as a GM, I'll pretty much only play savage worlds and a couple of other far more obscure systems.

CheshireCatAW
2009-06-01, 01:26 PM
Savage Worlds seems interesting; I recall reading a bit of it a few weeks ago.. Added to the list.

Doc Roc
2009-06-01, 01:37 PM
The core book is nine bucks or so.
I hear that's a selling point.

Tsotha-lanti
2009-06-01, 02:15 PM
WFRP is pretty great but quirky. The world is a cool mix of heavy metal fantasy, gritty plague-ridden filthy gutter-crawling Dark Ages, and early Renaissance. The system is a bit quirky; basically, you start out absolutely sucking at everything, with maybe a 40% chance to succeed at tasks that aren't incredibly easy (and much less if it's an opposed task). Combat is wonderfully lethal, but that's why you've got Fate Points.

I recommend it if you know the world and want to play in it. Otherwise, there's better options (like The Riddle of Steel, which excels at realistic, deadly, but smoother combat, and at real-world or fantasy versions of the Middle Ages or Renaissance).

WFRP magic is also wonderfully balanced IMO. At first, it just gives you abilities others can't have; if you progress far enough, it actually makes you more effective than others (throwing proper fireballs and so on); but the more powerful the magic you use, the greater the risk. Essentially, wizards will only wield magic in the greatest need, and will hope damned hard they don't tear open the fabric of reality and destroy themselves (literally; that's multiple results on the tables).

Morty
2009-06-01, 02:20 PM
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay


Which edition are you referring to? First and Second edition differ in many places, which I've seen spark debates not unlike those about 3rd and 4th editions of D&D, mostly on the subject of magic. I can recommend you 2nd edition - for the reasons Tsotha-lanti gave - but not the 1st, as I'm not familiar with it. Then again, 1st edition seems to be mostly forgotten. I also hope you don't mind real-world stylization, which is prevalent in the Warhammer world.

Tsotha-lanti
2009-06-01, 02:26 PM
First edition (the Hogshead one) isn't all that different, in my opinion. Magic is a bit different, and I think it actually lacked the chance of destroying yourself with the Warp, but was otherwise relatively similar. The newer edition is all over slightly superior, though; first edition was totally schizophrenic about what's a skill and what's a talent/ability, for one thing.

The quality of the newer edition's supplements is also through the roof, IMO (the Magic, Chaos, and Skaven ones are just fabulous), although the older adventures and stuff like the Middenheim sourcebook are still awesome (and still useful and usable).

Morty
2009-06-01, 02:31 PM
Yeah, from what I've seen in 1st edition rulebooks, it was sort of... chaotic. Not really thought-out to the end. And I wouldn't say that magic is similiar in both editions; if anything, that seems to be the element in which they differ the most. There's no Winds of Magic, spells need to be bought with XP(I think...) and there're spell points. Really though, most beefs people seem to have with 2nd edition is fluff. Especially since, allegedly, many of the fluff changes were made to accomodate the system to Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

Tsotha-lanti
2009-06-01, 02:38 PM
Well, yeah, as someone who grew up on HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest, I'm still bitter about Fimirs, but whatcha gonna do? It'd be crazy to try to develop and maintain a completely separate continuum from Warhammer Fantasy Battle, especially when many people no doubt come WFRP from WFB...

I've got to admit, I don't remember 1st edition magic too well anymore. We played the game a ton, but no one was ever a wizard or priest... (Did the priests even get proper spells?)

Speaking of Chaotic: 2nd edition doesn't have the horrible alignment system stolen straight out of D&D, but with only one axis...

Dixieboy
2009-06-01, 02:42 PM
WoD is a good game, but if playing any of the splats then realize this:
You are ****ed.

No matter which kind of being you are (Maybe except technocrat) you are royally screwed by the circumstances. (OwoD that is, not so much in NWoD, which is my main gripe with the setting, not enough sense of imminent doom)

Some hunters know they are in a very bad position, other don't, but you are meddling with forces you were simply not meant to.

You might think you are just out "Staking for jesus", but what you are really doing is killing a few neonate bugs, spoiling the fun of the elders, leaving you with one psychotic 400 year old guy with superpowers and endless experience in manipulation who's a wee bit grumpy that you just killed his servant.

For dark heresy:
For a 40k game this game lacks "epic", you aren't heroically standing on the top of a hill, shooting down the daemons and ork boyz so willing to go up there and rip you to shreds with your bolter guns while waiting for the exterminatus to power up.
You're interrogating a few chaos cultists and maybe slaying a minor slaneesh cult on imperial soil.
Which is all well and good, but not exactly the stuff of homerian epics.

I have only played those two on the list. :smallredface:

Corlindale
2009-06-01, 02:46 PM
I really like Warhammer Fantasy so far. The career system is fun and approaches realism to a greater extent than D&D - in Warhammer you will often start out as nobodies, which is an interesting change.

The combat system is fun, but deadly. An enemy just have to get lucky once or twice to kill a character - Fate points are an important element to alleviate this, but even so character death rate can be pretty high. Especially so if the players are still in the D&D->Warhammer transition phase, and have not yet learned that it is fully acceptable to run away in Warhammer, and more often than not the rational choice...

A nice consequence of the combat system is that it means everyone has at least a chance at contributing. Even a non-combat character can get a lucky swing with a sword and kill an enemy outright (my student character, despite a dismal WS of 29, seemed to have the odd knack of occasionally cutting the hands off enemies, making them bleed to death)

What surprised me was that Warhammer also does non-combat very well - when I first heard of it I assumed it would be a haphazard conversion of the tactical battle-game, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the world and the mechanics do a lot to support non-violence (besides just making violence downright dangerous) - and we've had several sessions without any attack rolls being made at all. Character's feel like they're contributing even if they're not total combat machines - I felt that my decidedly non-optimized Student/Hedge Wizard character in our campaign was generally a bit weak in combat, but when he left the group we suddenly realized that 1) We had no healer, and 2) We had no one in the party who could read :smallbiggrin:

The magic system is pretty cool as well, though I haven't played anything greater than an Apprentice Wizard so far. I really like the idea of having completely unlimited and unrestricted spells per day - but with each casting having the change of making disastrous things happen to you or your companions, increasing with the amount of power you wield...

One thing that could be either a problem or a feature depending on viewpoint is the very dark and gritty nature of the world. There's a lot of evil, corruption and gore - and the published adventures our GM has been running has featured plenty of moral ambiguity and essentially lose-lose scenarios (at one point we jokingly decided to adopt the philosophy of never doing the second part of a quest, as things would almost always go radically downhill).
There's a much less heroic feel than in D&D. If you defeat a demon in D&D, people will hail you as a hero - if you do likewise in Warhammer you are not going to be bragging about it, because the Witchhunters might come after you just in case you have been corrupted by being in the presence of said demon. And odds are you have been - it's very easy to gain mutations, and in the lore of the world it is considered fully legitimate to kill and burn mutants.

Someone mentioned the lore books. I've only read the core book and Realms of Sorcery, but I was extremely impressed by the latter in particular. Basically an entire book filled with fantastically detailed and well-written information about the magic orders, the day-to-day lives of wizards, the nature of magic and all kinds of stuff - as well as a lot of cool new stuff and spells to play with, of course. But the Lore/Mechanic ratio is something like 90/10, whereas I would assume something like Arcane Power 4th might be the other way around..

EDIT: I'm speaking of 2nd edition, by the way. Never played 1st.

Morty
2009-06-01, 03:05 PM
Well, yeah, as someone who grew up on HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest, I'm still bitter about Fimirs, but whatcha gonna do? It'd be crazy to try to develop and maintain a completely separate continuum from Warhammer Fantasy Battle, especially when many people no doubt come WFRP from WFB...

Crazy maybe; but apparently, many of the 1st edition folks are angry about it. Especially about the changes made to magic, it seems. I'm impartial, myself, I got into RPGs too late.


I've got to admit, I don't remember 1st edition magic too well anymore. We played the game a ton, but no one was ever a wizard or priest... (Did the priests even get proper spells?)

Well, I've never actually played 1st edition, just read the rulebook a bit. But I recall that both wizards and priests got spell points and spells the same way, it's just that there were several spell lists.


Speaking of Chaotic: 2nd edition doesn't have the horrible alignment system stolen straight out of D&D, but with only one axis...

Oh Jesus, that one. Yeah, it was terrible. Like D&D alignment system, only worse and more rigid.
And on the subject of Realms of Sorcery: I myself have somewhat mixed feelings about it. Yes, the new spells, TC's effects and arcane marks are all great, as well as rules for hedge wizards who managed to somehow survive long enough to learn more advanced spells. Fluff is great too, especially regarding the forms of magic outside Imperial Collegies, which I found lacking in the core rulebook. What made my jaw drop though, was the description of the magic academies in Altdorf. I'd expect to see something like that in a D&D setting, but not Warhammer.

Knaight
2009-06-01, 03:53 PM
It's not on the list, but let me toss it into the arena.

Savage Worlds.

A friend of mine ran five major encounters in four hours. That's a pretty fair advertisement in my opinion. While I'll run anything as a GM, I'll pretty much only play savage worlds and a couple of other far more obscure systems.

Its a pretty awesome game, I would agree with that. Its also very lightweight overall, while having a decent amount of combat crunch, if it is wanted. However there is another game I prefer that fills that exact same niche, a bit more, and does the whole thing better.
Fudge (http://www.fudgerpg.com)