Cattle Finding & Combat – a WFRP actual play
I was in Brisbane again for work this week and managed to play a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game with some people I’d met via RPG.net. This was very nice of them as I was essentially hijacking their D&D game night to demand we played a game I was keen on.
It was a simple one-shot scenario – cattle are missing and the sheriff won’t do anything about it (he’s a drunk) so our heroes agree to take on the task. We did standard WFRP random character generation, which led to much hilarity and ended up with a dwarf bodyguard, an elven apprentice wizard, a human pit fighter (me) and another human whose career has escaped me!
I didn’t write proper notes up (as evidenced above) and I’ve got a cold so I won’t do a blow by blow run down of the narrative but this was the first time I’ve been a player in WFRP for a long time (actually the second time ever) and I had a great deal of fun. Interestingly, while I love the setting and the career system of WFRP, I’m pretty critical of the combat system. As I said in the comments to my recent Dark Heresy actual play post “miss, miss, miss, hit dead isn’t actually more fun than hit, miss, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, dead.” Tonight however, the combat was everything that it should have been: fast, simple and deadly. The main combat was the PCs, the mob and a horde or goblins (including a shaman and a troll). It went quickly and the ‘whiff’ factor of always missing didn’t seem to much of an issue. The games I’ve run don’t seem to work so well.
So I’ve been wondering why that could have been and come up with some possibilities. Perhaps it’s a issue of play style – the group I’ve always played WFRP with played some fairly tactical D&D3.5 for a long time together and maybe we just have different expectations of RPG combat? The combat was also quite different than combats I’ve tended to run in WFRP – lots of mook types with some big stuff. I’ve always tended in RPGs to run combats with creatures who individually are as tough or tougher than the PCs. The way this combat worked meant that we sort of ploughed through the goblins but that when PCs did get hit, it still hurt a whole lot. That made it fun without taking away the sense of danger.
Anyway – it made me want to play some quick WFRP stuff at some point. If anyone’s keen and in Melbourne, let me know!
1 Comment to Cattle Finding & Combat – a WFRP actual play
Russel was a Bailiff. Part of the smoothness, if I do say myself, is I run things a bit fast and loose, and discourage my players from parrying and dodging where I can. I like my games all wham and bam and boffo!
April 21, 2009