Its been a while since this has been 'complete'

Wasn't a card game. The cards were little more than reference points for character abilities.

there's no point in getting into a dead game with specialty dice

Why not? The game is quite complete. It is impossible to get the dice or something?

>change is inherently good in a world where interactive media becomes worse and more desperate to please a wide audience by the day
I am and I will though, as do the majority of people that want to play a roleplaying game in the Old World. Thanks for your support.

...

Ouch.

Base set still comes with a set. Also can play online if you can find and get the FG mod to work.

>Also can play online if you can find and get the FG mod to work.

Hmmm, that may be dead too. So maybe it's a dead game unless you already own it.

Yeah, it's not like you can't mod the dice or anything...

I'd say it's pointless to get into 3rd now that you literally can't buy the fucking thing from anywhere. Our group is one book away from complete set.

Mind you, not like 2e didn't have it's own issues (Like how firearms were a fucking joke)

I own every supplement, every single one, I even had to call ADC distribution to find the Bright College pack and they only happened to have one caked in dust in their warehouse.

Rarely played, because my group preferred 2nd edition, we're playing Zweihander right now which is the love letter to 2nd ed, and 4th edition is right around the corner. That said I think it's a damn brilliant game.

Ultimately the problem wasn't even the execution but how it launched. The core set is very bland and lacking the setting rich details, the expansions ESPECIALLY the latter ones really breathed life into it and it felt just as thematic as 2nd ed.

It's hard to recommend because it's now rare and hard to find now, but if you can manage to get your hands on a complete set it's more or less the greatest RPG/board game feeling game you'll own. If you're more a purist, wait for 4th ed or pick up Zweihander

I'd say it's a good game for someone who's trying out pen&paper roleplaying. Just a handful of cards instead of digging out a bigass rulebook every 5 minutes.

Heroes call was the biggest pain for me to find, personally. Glad I got it. At one point it was selling for over a thousand dollars. Heroes call was pretty bad ass. It had a simple set of outer borders for you to place the creature cards on that would make them boss variants by adding stats and expertise dice to areas and stats depending on what type of boss. Wizards clerics warlords etc.

Trying to find Lure of Power. Nothing. I imagine the promise of Slaanesh lewds got all the nerds in total hoard-mode.

Blunderbuss seems pretty godlike at first lvl if we are talking fire-and-forget

It genuinely pleases me to see there is at least two other people who love 3e in this thread. I always feel like I'm the only one.

We should start a support group!

It's an FFG RPG, so I assume it's wonky as shit and purposefully designed around having proprietary bits like dice and cards and whatnot. That's enough for me to disregard it completely.

Then, I have all but three of the 2E books on my shelf, next to my hardcover ZWEIHANDER. And binders of printed fan material (Liber Fanatica, etc). I still play it on and off, though my group played it pretty hard from 2005-2010.

I'm naturally averse to spending extra money on this hobby; TTRPG requires books and dice, and you can digitize both and get them for free if you really want to. Investing in all those extra bits and bobs is a really unattractive prospect to me.

Looking forward to 4e.

It is a great RPG if you get the bulk of it, but I can understand people not liking it. It was so different than most other systems it was going to be jarring to most people anyway.

I love it. Probably the best fantasy rpg system I have used, but can easily see why others wouldn't like it for a variety of different reasons.

The bits and bobs, the limited player count for a good session, the non-existence of a solid online play option, the game specific dice, etc.

What does it do that 2E or other games don't? Sincerely asking.

Played it a couple of evenings and here's the resume: It's unnecessarily complicated and everything it does, FFG Star Wars does better. FFG Star Wars is what you get if you take the WFRP3 system and throw out everything that's annoying and shit.

In WFRP3e, every action has its own card and on that card, its own list of things to buy from. In combat, you don't get to describe shit, because you're way too busy balancing dice pools and calculating effects. This also makes combat drag out needlessly, even after the regular time people should need to get to terms with the system. It even tries to do that with "social combat", we threw that out instantly but I imagine every discussion goes from being RP'd to "Okay his attitude is negative, so I tap "I thought we were friends", my stance is 2 green, my Fel is 4 and I got Persuasion skilled once, so this means...2 blue dice, 2 green dice, 1 yellow die and 2 purple problem dice and 1 black die...Okay I got 2 successes and one benefit remaining, so now from the card I buy..." you get the drift. In a normal game we'd have conversed a bit and then done a dice roll and the GM determines if it's enough.

Not him, but many like the "success but..." and "success and..." stuff the dice give. Lots of ways to give small bonuses and penalties ad hoc. Very little need for more than a GM screen worth of rules to play due to the cards. There are some modern touches like better streamlined and balanced skills and stats. Fatigue and Stress system that is both fun and interesting.

Meanwhile it keeps most of the good stuff from 2e, like the careers and fluff and "oi mate, yer fooked" levels of "perilous" if you like.

We had these issues the first few sessions too, but they all got better with familiarity. I could say that about a lot of games though.

I agree the Star Wars is more streamlined, but any revision of a game should be. The stuff Star Wars removed made it quicker but also lost some good stuff as well.

We played for 5-6 evenings, that should really be more than enough time to get to terms with a system - but it wasn't, because every time you get a new card, it's essentially a new hit table. And the tables are also bad. As opposed to FFG Star Wars where the advantages and disadvantages let you/the GM go shopping on a general list (ONE LIST), in this game it's very plausible that you roll no success and 8 fucking advantages and the card only allows for "A: One free maneuver" once. That's just shit.

I also didn't enjoy how the die probabilities are geared towards failure unless you minmax very hard. How the system replaces RP with boardgame mechanics. How the stance bar is an interesting idea, but terribly executed. How the core book doesn't actually contain much in the way of proper setting/fluff. I just kept on having problems with it.

>It also felt very un-warhammery.
Literally the "it felt like a MMORPG" argument used for D&D 4e.

It's not.

>And the tables are also bad. As opposed to FFG Star Wars where the advantages and disadvantages let you/the GM go shopping on a general list (ONE LIST), in this game it's very plausible that you roll no success and 8 fucking advantages and the card only allows for "A: One free maneuver" once. That's just shit.

Warhammer had that one generic list as well, just like Star Wars. Your cards just gave more options when taking those specific actions.

>we're playing Zweihander right now which is the love letter to 2nd ed

I just stumbled onto that. Having never played WHFRP, but loving everything I'm reading about both it and Zweihander, what are the pros and cons of it? How does it play? What do you like / not like? I'm a D&D fag but have been wanting to get out for years. Unfortunately, I DM for a bunch of casuals

>I also didn't enjoy how the die probabilities are geared towards failure unless you minmax very hard.
Sounds just like 2e.

As I said earlier, I agree the core book didn't have enough, that's why I said the supplements really brought the system into its own but by the time they came around litteraly no one was interested in the system.

While I'm not saying that you have to like the system, I think a lot of your frustrations come from misunderstanding some rules (it's reasonable given how different this is to anything else), We played a few of the prewritten adventures and campaign hooks and while it took a learning curve eventually combat flowed very fluidly. I did completely immersed myself in the rules at the time though so it may have been chalked up to being able to settle questions quickly. For example there are generic buys you could use advantages with.

Regarding Star Wars, they took a lot that they learned from WFRP3e and applied it which is great, because Star Wars wasn't really about special actions you could take so cards weren't a grave importance. One could argue that neither was Warhammer but some of the special move cards in later expansions are just too much fun, they also injected a lot of the black humor that WFRP had later in the product cycle and its a shame it wasn't there to start.

Ultimately I think this could have been successful if it A) wasn't Warhammer, it could have sold like hotcakes if it was a different property like FFG's own Descent/Runebound setting as the board game elements would have totally fit, or B) wasn't as conservative of a launch and instead featured the crazy design elements of the expansions early. It needed more to set it apart, it wasn't WFRP in the core box, and not different enough to set apart from other fantasy RPGs at the time.

There are still concepts I really like about the system that were lost in the translation to Star Wars. We loved the party card dynamic, how talents would slot and lock in, I heard criticism of the stance system but my players thought it was a really cool element especially in how cards behaved differently. Once the stack of career cards grew back to the hundreds we expect of this game setting there was a lot of chances to try new and weird options. As a GM I liked how quickly encounters could be built on the fly and how you modify monsters easily to create more elite baddies, some of the more abstract minigames that expansions gave, when the game is a complete set it's VERY charming but I understand that a lot of folks really dont want to hunt everything down.

As a comment to difficulty, 3e is way easier to accomplish tasks than 2e. Like Star Wars it's more about narrative driving so failures are far less common, especially in combat once stances are shifted. In 2e failure was very common but that's also part of the appeal of it, the comedy that naturally arises from incompetence.

Ultimately Zweihander is a "Greatest Hits" album of WFRP. It puts all the best, choice bits into one book which is extremely helpful (maybe I don't want to look through five splatbooks every game), it doesn't introduce too many new elements but that's not the point, it's about refining a beloved system that's hard to get in hardcover anymore.

This all said I'm excited for both 4e games, including Age of Sigmar because I think that high fantasy setting is ripe for some more epic level gameplay. I'm guessing it'll be Deathwatch WFRP Edition

I wish I could play the game. But with everything OOP and hard to find I am stuck in a shitty position. Maybe there is a tabletop simulator mod with all of the components.,

That's why I can't really make a strong case if someone says "I think it's dumb and I don't want to play it". I can' t really say "give it a chance" because the core game is really lacking and the complete set is a down payment on a car these days (Myself and the 10 other people who actually liked it snatched up all the expansions when they sold for $10 each on clearance on FFG's site) so the best I can do is run games for people willing to try and at least show what it COULD have been.

The other hard part is that I don't think online play will work as well. Yes they came out with hardcover books that were designed to play without the cards but, scoff at it all you want, they really were the soul of the game. My players really enjoyed looking through their hand of special moves to see what would be best in combat, or slapping down an opportunistic ability rarely seen, they liked slotting them into their character cards, tapping them like magic cards, etc. I think it REQUIRES a GM that's passionate about both the WFRP setting and the flow of the gameplay to make work, but when it does it's a really unique experience that no other game can replicate.

To quote Hunter S Thompson "Too weird to live, too rare to die"

>The other hard part is that I don't think online play will work as well.

I got to play with a Fantasy Grounds mod around 2014 or so and it was great as it had everything integrated very well and all worked quite nicely, a lot of fun.

Sadly, I lost touch with that group and it seems the mod no longer works.

Okay that's fair. I guess I'm more of a tactile guy but if it works then eventually someone has to archive it somewhere for roll20 or Fantasy Grounds.

You don't have the fun of cards, but it's easier to handle all the fiddly bits for stances and stuff. It's a trade off.

The files exist but I guess they don't work with current FG since the mod was never official and hadn't been worked on in a long time.

It did not seem to emulate Old World and had different tone and power scope. Anons above claim that owning dozen other boxes fixes it marvellously, but well- I bought that hard in no component-heavy game.

I'm the user you're talking about and yeah, by the time the expansions came out it feels as fluffy as 2e, especially Lure of Power (one of the hardest to get these days sadly) and The Enemy Within campaign (It's not the same as the classic 1st ed one, but it's still the best prewritten adventure of the edition. Really liked it)

The expansions also brought the "power level" back in line with what's to be expected. It's not that the core game made players too powerful, it's that there wasn't enough options that felt low-tier and your monsters got access to a lot of actions that made them fucking terrifying to encounter. That's one of the best parts of 3e, players didn't know exactly what to expect from monsters even if they fought them over and over because their action cards could change depending on the GM's story needs, gave them a lot of flavor.

Again, the problem is the Core box didn't do enough, and while other games can get away from it this game needed a strong flavor of the setting out the gate. Had some of the elements of the expansions found their way into the core box from the start I think it would have sold a lot better.

I think I own all the supplements for this, and although there are bits I really like, I've only ever managed to play a single game of it.

The biggest complaint we had as a group, was that it actually required quite a bit of space to play the game. Two starting characters, and all their associated cards, took up so much room on one side of a table, that it made it really awkward to play. Admittedly, we were in a bar, but the tables weren't the smallest I've ever played on.

I liked the idea of the different stances, although I've heard that it can lead to some weird situations. The dice, whilst annoying to have to buy, lead people to think more narratively about their actions than the percentile system seemed to. The party sheet was a nice addition, although I can see the stress metre becoming a frustration rather than an interesting mechanic, I can see what they were trying to accomplish with it.

Basically, other than the stance system, they pretty much ported over everything I liked to the Star Wars RPG, whilst ditching the bits that I found irritating.

They didn't change the world at all from 2e, just rolled it back a decade or so, this meant all you knew of the setting from 2e, fluff wise, or can dig out of the older books is almost all valid.

Ultimately I think we can agree that the biggest weakness is packaging and presentation. Once you have the complete set and dig into it, it's pretty great. How they went about getting that to us was a bit questionable.

It sold for too much, with a lot of fiddly physical components, at a time that 2e was doing extremely well with a lot of loyal players. Ultimately it turned into a beta test for the far superior FFG Star Wars system. If you want to play 3e, buy the generic version of the FFG system that's coming out and run the Old World in it.

What I meant is that the core box didn't feature enough of the setting, not when the setting took place. The expansions added more of the details that set WFRP apart from other fantasy RPGs

For comparison, the core book of 2e features enough of the setting to get you into the tone of the game. 3e was a lot more conservative, maybe to attract a broader audience, but they should have gone full hog from the start. It sure worked for their 40k RPG releases, don't know why they changed strategy here.

Oh, you mean the argument that was used as a positive talking point for the first several years of the game's existence by proponents of the game, which later somehow transformed into 'lol le never tru maymay' by 4e-lovers after they'd become the 'salty grognards' they spent years shitting on?

The only people that ever went 4E=WoW were shitting on it and you know it.

That's a lie.
It was said all the time after the game came out.
People *impressed* with the game noted how the 'Striker, Defender, Leader, Controller' mapped neatly onto the already-existing 'DPS, Tank, Heal, Mez' paradigm of MMO characters.
It wasn't until the game was on the way out that people conveniently forgot how happy they'd been to make those comparisons originally.

I'm not even sure you were alive back then. "Plays like an MMO" is a well worn insult that dates back to 3.0 and to the old Diablo supplement.

>Table space complaint

The way we solved this is a card only hit the table when it was actively being used, the rest were kept in a deck/player's hand until such a time

It massively cut down on player space and became far more natural because it gave a clearer picture of what was actively happening with each player at any given time to everyone at the table.

A pretty sensible step and one we'd have probably gone with if we'd managed more than a single session.

You want to know what is maddening? Having a player group too large to play the game and who only wants to play online for our gaming sessions.

I have a complete set of one of the best fantasy RPG systems out there with about 8 extra sets of dice. The whole spiel.

Got a group of 8 players who all want to play D&D.

They are good folks and a good group. Been meeting once a week for well over 2 years without missing a single session (excluding holidays and the like) so I am not complaining, but on the same token, it is highly disappointing.

I am setting on prime rib and all everyone want to eat is McDonalds.

That's not really right at all. Plays like an MMO was never not an insult.

>Oh, you mean the argument that was used as a positive talking point for the first several years of the game's existence by proponents of the game

Citation required? I've literally never seen someone say that and treat it as a good thing.

It was always an insult. I think user is confused.

4ed was extremely balanced from a character standpoint, but that was the problem. It really wrecked a lot of the extremes that you get with a party dynamic.

It focused on combat, which most editions do, but it took it to a crazy extreme of combat focus.

It was still entertaining, but really wasn't a good fit because, in my personal opinion, it didn't go far enough to address the flaws with D&D on the whole. It was only slightly different and in some ways the slight differences were better and some ways they were worse. It was a serviceable system and it wasn't total shit like a lot of grognards seems to think it was, but it was also easily replaced with 5ed with next to no reason to ever go back to it.

3ed had enough splat and lore that dipping your toes in it is feasible, hell, Pathfinder is nothing more than 3.5 edition and it still gets plenty of love, but basically nobody stuck with 4e when 5e dropped. And the less mentioned about the Essentials line the better.

Warhammer 3e was a huge, and I mean a fuck huge change to the system from the ground up. Some people loved it, some people hated it, but to be fair it pretty much the only totally massive undertaking I have seen in an established RPG line to completely and utterly change the formula entirely with a new edition and whether or not you liked it, one should still give FFG props for doing what they did instead of just releasing the same shit as always like the did with 40k rpg line (not slighting that line, mind you).

>It focused on combat, which most editions do,
>4/10 is now most

4e has as much non-combat support as most of those editions. Heck, more than 3.5 if you are not a spellcaster because the skill system actually works.

He could, it's much easier to buy/find a group for. Or he could also play 4e, which is going back to the same principles as the first two editions. There's a reason the redheaded stepchild was taken behind the shed and shot.

>4e has as much non-combat support as most of those editions.
Seeing as there isn't fuck in the way of mechanical exploration support in 4e, I'm going to go with no.

Dig into any edition of D&D, user. ANY edition, and the bulk of the rules are for how to handle combat and using spells for combat related purposes.

The original game didn't really focus on combat for shit, mind you, and Chainmail was supposed to be what was used, but as time went on flanking, armor bonuses, increases to chances to hit, grapple rules, damage modifiers, etc. have become the main focus for the bulk of D&D for a long, long time.

AD&D was where that shit started too. I loved me some AD&D mind you, and TSR did adventure modules far better than the shit we get for most adventures these days where a DM can run something as soon as he cracks the plastic on the cover of the adventure with fuck all prep time.

I really want to get into do that, personally. Make stand alone level specific adventures that as soon as the DM opens them, everything is laid out so he can read from the shit on the go. Player hand outs for maps, cryptic messages, and the like, quick reference cards for monsters. A random encounter table for any given area with a MM page number for each monster listed if they want to look them up, social interactions for how characters look and act, and have it all done so the group can play through it all in two sessions at the max with their goal being accomplished and growth occurring.

Adventures these days are shit that require far too much prep time from a DM perspective.

Back to the main point though, D&D is pretty heavily combat focused and has been so for decades. If you were doing social shit, you have to kind of wing it with limited influence outside of persuasion, intimidation, and other such skills.

Another thing I have to give Warhamer 3e credit for, the amount of social related skills and abilities were pretty mind boggling in comparison to D&D.

So what would you want? Environmental Rules, Wilderness Survival Rules etc? 4e has those.

>Another thing I have to give Warhamer 3e credit for, the amount of social related skills and abilities were pretty mind boggling in comparison to D&D.

It's this weird thing with many RPGs. You can have a billion feats and special abilities on 'How to use a sword' that you can't otherwise do but the moment you give people special social abilities beyond a higher skill bonus people throw a shitfit. I'm not 100% sure why.

At least with a d100 rollunder system it's clear what the problem is. Throw a few advances to the players, or bump up everyone's starting base stats by 15%, and you can tell the effect. FFG games have so many moving pieces it requires a lot of mastery to see how it all comes together, let alone tinkering with the math.

Objectively, 3e was better than 2e in almost every way EXCEPT for the way content was released for it. 2e had everything you needed in one book to run a complete game, 3e pretty much required a bunch of supplemental purchases to get a 'complete' game. When you had all the stuff needed for that game, 3e blew 2e out of the water.

FFG's release of content fucked it up worse than anything else. I am one of the few who don't give the game shit for the proprietary dice though, they really drove a lot of the game in great ways.

>the bulk of the rules are for how to handle combat and using spells for combat related purposes.
That doesn't mean that the gameplay itself is combat-focused you chimp.

Because stop rollplaying, user. If you have mechanics for it, it means you're playing the game wrong, because roleplaying games should separate the roleplaying and the gaming as much as possible.

Isn't the gameplay (If the rules don't affect it, like you say) dependent on the guy running the game in that case?

Guy with complete 3e set here, I don't know if I'd be as bold to say it's objectively better, it's just different.

2nd Edition is a very simple and intuitive system, and I've run a LOT of games with it to where it's created some of the best stories among my group.

That said I do think 3e is innovative in a lot of ways, the real question is was it necessary and I'd say it's not, at least for WarHammer. Had this been their Runebound setting I think it could have been a huge player in the market, making it Warhammer themed was a gamble that didn't pay off but I really appreciate the ideas and development for it.

I'd love to run more of 3e, because it has a refreshing and different feel, but I still wouldn't say that just because it's different means it's better.

>xp rules incentivise getting in and grabbing anything valuable over fighting things
>wandering monster checks further incentivise this by punishing standing around and camping in unsafe areas
>morale and reaction rules provide a lot of opportunities to either not have to murder everything or not even have to fight them to begin with
>a suitably creative spellcaster can get you around a bunch of combats
The reason there are so many rules for combat is so you can see how dumb it is to go looking for fights.

>a suitably creative spellcaster can get you around a bunch of combats
>The reason there are so many rules for combat is so you can see how dumb it is to go looking for fights.

God forbid you play a Fighter in that case.

You Fighter will be spending most of his time playing packmule, because his high STR enables him to carry more treasure and/or equipment that spindlyarms the wizard.

And, because no matter how hard you try you're going to fuck up eventually, when the goblins do work out that you're stealing their shit, you're going to be quite glad he's there to get in the way.

>You Fighter will be spending most of his time playing packmule, because his high STR enables him to carry more treasure and/or equipment that spindlyarms the wizard.

That sounds boring as fuck. Also: Isn't that entirely dependent on how the dice rolls go? Fighter is the 'You didn't have high enough stats for any other option' class.

For 3rd that was true, but back in ADD fighters were the only class that were consistent damage dealers.

Oh, I was actively talking about AD&D. Stat minimums, with Fighter being (iirc) the only one without stat minimums. It literally was the 'You couldn't be a ranger/barbarian/paladin' class.

They recently killed the page on the official site.

>tfw can't find it anywhere that will ship here for less than 100$.

The Humble Bundle seems pretty good. My friends are ever only interested in playing a custom setting of our own tho, would WHF be easy to adapt? I mainly wanna try it out because it has rules for guns that are probably more balanced than what I was able to come up with.

Ranger and paladin were fighter subclasses, and getting good enough stats to play either was ridiculously rare. It wasn't "well you rolled super shitty so here's your consolation prize fighter". Barbarian was a kit. The fighter's ability requirement/prime requisite was Strength

Also, in my experience it's spindlyarms the wizard who ends up at the packmule at early levels, especially since there's not much else for him to do and he's likely the one with the lightest basic load

The only reason I ever play 2e is to play in Warhammer-land. There are many better systems one way or another if you're looking at pure mechanics.

I'd genuinely rather play 5e D&D than WFRP2e if we were using a different setting.

>It also felt very un-warhammery.
Please give some examples or evidence. Other than enjoying the mechanics more, the setting felt the same to me playing 2e or 3e, GM styling aside.

Well, we're currently using 5e for our custom game, but I based the setting heavily off Warhammer Fantasy, so I was thinking maybe it would be fitting. Is it not a very good game mechanically speaking?

Some do I guess, but I don't find anything good about it other than the Careers and Warhammer flavor. Even the "revised" versions they did for the 40k games aren't much of an improvement.

While the Warhammer Fantasy setting is one of my top-5, the rules just are functional but not really good, lots of better systems out there. I even say that as someone currently playing in a game.

Wonder how Fate would handle something like Warhammer?

Actually, since the whole thing about Fate is being unique characters and Warhammer stressed you are commonplace shit right out the gate, it might not do too well.

Is that critical to the game though?

It's a solid fantasy setting, it's just things are generally set against grand heroics. One could say the same for oWoD stuff too, no matter how bad-ass you were, you were still a pawn in Jyhad or whatever.

Warhammer is just against stupid "you're the world saving chosen one" bullshit, which I always felt was crap no matter the system. It's more about a few guys trying to carve out a piece of life for themselves that isn't shit.

I don't see how being a disposable, incapable nobody is a requirement.

What are your complaints about 2e? It's my favorite system but I have limited experience with others.

I just like very little about it. It's fine, it works, but all of it is simply done better by other games.

Though I will say the magic is interesting. Not a lot of games have "magic is dangerous" as an idea and implement it well, though I wish they would.

New user here
It's BRP, Basic Roleplay, so of course it's simple. The draw of the WarHammer games isn't that you have some feat that grants you a super combo limit break move but that the ruleset wouldn't get in the way of characters doing creative things. Anytime a player wanted to do something out of the ordinary the GM just needed to access the skill and difficulty, badda bing badda boom. The way it handles critical wounds is very fitting for a sword and sorcery style game but beyond that it doesn't NEED anymore mechanical flare.

Ironically if you're looking for more stuff and more unique abilities in Warhammer than 3e may be right up your ally. The action cards for special moves are filled to the brim with flavorful action, even the monsters have zany abilities they can throw at you. It stifles creativity a bit but if you're more into using the resources at your disposal than coming up with your own 3e does a damn solid job.

I guess if I was going to use a game to represent the grimdark mixed with black humor of Warhammer that wasn't BRP or FFG's I'd use Dungeon Crawl Classics as they're cut from the same cloth but DCC is d20 based

My complaint isn't that it's "simple" nor it is about PC's needing "neat tricks", it is that you can find better systems to do everything it does, with perhaps the exception of the magic.

The system is mediocre and I'd never give it a second look if it wasn't for the settings attached.

Have ran it for several years with no real problems. Don't fix what isn't broke?

I've got something around 40+ rulesets on my bookshelves because I like trying new things but I wouldn't say any one system is completely better than it at what it sets out to accomplish. Sure you got games that have more interesting or mathmatically precise mechanics or a different leveling procedure but slapping the Warhammer setting onto those rulesets creates a different feel of gameplay. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't. A Warhammer game using FATE would feel very different than a Warhammer game using The Burning Wheel or a Warhammer game using Powered by the Apocalypse or even a Warhammer game using Dungeon Crawl Classics.

All those rulesets change how gameplay feels because they focus on different elements.

What ruleset would you run Warhammer under and why?

>Have ran it for several years with no real problems.
You didn't find it strange that people had terrible chances to succeed at skill checks without autistically investing into it? You didn't find it boring when fights stall because people can't hit shit due to the many safety layers available to virtually everyone (parrying/dodging, toughness/armor, low hit chances all around) and a lack of combat options that actually matter? You didn't think any of the career options could use tweaks and reworks?

Honestly, after trying to run WFRP3 and Rogue Trader for my friends I gave up on Warhammer games. To be fun they require the players to be into the setting and no one was or was interested in learning.

Any different system I wanted to try would need an adjusted magic system to fit the style and some kind of insanity and taint stuff. That said I bet GURPS would work well, especially being able to adjust starting characters power level to be scrubs if you wanted.

If you wanted a simpler game, could use Barbarians of Lemuria, just turn Warhammer Careers into the BoL job things and there goes most of the game.

Since you have to do work for magic and corruption and stuff, a lot of systems are available.

Common mistake with the system for newcomers: Not every test is at +0 modifer. If you're not doing something difficult, then it's not uncommon to give the players a +10 or +20 mod, especially if they describe their action in a way that would grant them a circumstantial bonus ("I want to convince the lord that his manor is no longer safe enough for him or his family, and I show him the cultist dagger we found", that dagger makes the argument more persuasive than just talking, and could grant a bonus). Note this could work in reverse too. Characters in WFRP are more "mundane" than regular fantasy RPG heroes but let the players tell you what extra effort they're putting in. Let them research tomes to grant bonuses to knowledge checks, or tell you how they look for gutters to help with a climb check, etc.

Dodge/parry takes up your reaction, it's like bonus action economy in 5e. Attack the same target twice and, unless they have a talent, they can't dodge the attack, perfect time for a Full Out Attack or Charge or Two Weapon Fighting. What other attack options are you looking for?

Careers work best when they're random, by its design some are more powerful than others. Sometimes you're a Camp Follower, sometimes you're a Soldier, but with time those differences really don't mean too much. If one player is stronger than you in combat use that to your own advantage in other places. WFRP is very much a team game.

/by swapping BRP for GURPs you're taking a generic system and replacing it with an even more generic system except now you got all the baggage that comes with GURPs instead.

I don't know about BoL so I can't comment on it, never heard of it.

You are right that a lot of WFRP and it's 40k counterparts is the setting and if people aren't invested then it's hard to get behind but, really that's up to the GM if the players aren't knowledgeable of it. In WFRP you don't need to know about the Dark Gods or the history of Elvan strife, you just need to know about what daily life is like in the Empire and I've found that running a game in 2e's preferred setting: just after the Storm of Chaos, is a good way to get new players interested as it's an Empire trying to rebuild, almost post-apocalyptic, and it's easy to understand the bleakness and tight war economy of the setting. It also makes encountering a single, wounded Chaos Warrior in a foggy forest that much more impactful.

Same goes for the 40k games, especially Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader, they require a GM who knows the setting like the back of their hand so they can breath life and make the session filled with themes and flavors, then newcomers will get into it naturally.

Even with a +30 circumstantial mod (the highest one), your chances were shit without minmaxing. The average guy has like 30 in a stat, so he's getting a 60% chance on the easiest task he could possibly be doing. That's just terrible. You can go through 3 careers that have the same skill and end up with a +20% increase, resulting in 80% for the easiest possible task. There's still a considerable margin of failure there for a literal master of his craft trying to do an incredibly easy task.

Dodge/parry didn't use a 'reaction' in 2e. That wasn't a thing. You could do one of each every turn, so you could dodge one attack and parry another. You're mixing it up with the way 40k RPGs handle it.

Because skills are so terribly situational and unreliable, getting random-rolled into a skill-focused career is just a hurdle to overcome before being able to invest into the actually useful combat careers. Those usually have skills in them, too - neat little fluff options on top of actual benefits.

>The average guy has like 30 in a stat, so he's getting a 60% chance on the easiest task he could possibly be doing.
Having never played WHFRP, are you expecting to be rolling for the easiest task he could possibly be doing?

>/by swapping BRP for GURPs you're taking a generic system and replacing it with an even more generic system except now you got all the baggage that comes with GURPs instead.

This is only an issue if you think that all generic systems come with equal problems.

If a skill check is an auto pass, you shouldn't be rolling anything for it. In fact the rules say that if there's no consequence of failure you shouldn't be rolling in the first place. In play we never had a problem with people failing "too often", and if it's something that has a risk of failure but still needs to succeed you can give them the success but with some consequence, Degrees of Failure is built for this ("I failed to pick the lock by less than a degree" "Okay, you manage to shimmy the lock open enough that you can force it open but your picks got chewed up in the process").

You're right about reactions, but it's still the same dang thing pretty much. Keep in mind that Dodge Blow is an Advanced Skill meaning you can't use it untrained which the vast majority of enemies do not (except higher threat ones, obviously). It may be harder to hit someone than in a game like D&D but they specifically describe that each attack is an exchange of blows and defensive moves and when each blow has the potential to cut you down in a hit or two combat is pretty deadly (unless everyone is clomping around in full armor and has a TB of 5 I guess but that rarely happens). In my experience combats wouldn't last any longer than a 5E encounter and FAR more efficient than a 4E encounter.

And I don't know what games you're playing but even Fishermen in my games would find usefulness, but then again our campaigns were a balance of maybe 60% intrigue to 40% combat. Players have actually called out their favorite careers to play and it's usually things like Ferrymen, Rat Catchers, Agitators, and Baliffs rather than what you may expect to be popular.

Ultimately WFRP is a very different game than most fantasy RPGs. You really gotta be into the sword and sorcery style games to get into it. My group also loves DCC, Torchbearer, Hackmaster, and now the new Conan 2d20 game so we're very much used to the scrappy survivalist games.