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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Third Edition (WFRP3) is the newest edition of the classic Games Workshop RPG, designed by Jay Little and published by Fantasy Flight Games. It's a pretty huge change from what came before, and I'll warn you that my sole experience of the previous two editions is skimming articles in old White Dwarfs, which means I'm approaching the game from the perspective of what it is, rather than what it used to be.

The Components

I usually don't talk a lot about the "components" of an RPG, because you tend to have layout design, artwork, and that's about it. But WFRP3, as you probably already know, is a totally different beast. It comes in a very large box that retails for a hundred dollars, and there's a ton of stuff in there.

Because there is so much to cover when considering WFRP3's components, I've broken my discussion into three sections: what the components are physically, what they're intended to do (in my opinion), and what their drawbacks are. After all of that, I'll give a final rating of how well I think the components work.

Their Physicality

Before I go into much depth about what the components do, I'd like to talk about their physical design a bit. If this bores you, just skip to the next section.

There are 165 standard-size cards and 224 half-size cards in WFRP3. They're each printed on medium-heavy cardstock with linen texturing. Most of them are filled with words, though where there's space the card designs there tends to be very high-quality artwork. The layout is likewise attractive and good use has been made of standard placement of card sections which make it easy to pick out specific bits of information. As a Eurogame player, my one complaint is that icons aren't used more extensively to make it easier to figure out what a card does at a glance.

I'm going to talk a bit about the action, condition, insanity, miscast, and wound cards in the next few sections of this review. They make up the vast majority of the cards in the set. There are also a handful of location cards that you can use to quickly lay out important settings in an encounter. However, with just 12 of these available there aren't really enough of them yet to allow for constant usage.

The 35 sheets are each about double the size of the card. They're printed on medium-weight cardstock with a matte finish. There are just two sorts of sheets--careers and parties--and quite a bit of work has been done to make them attractive designs, which is good because they'll usually be sitting out on the table. Again, I would have liked more icons, especially for the party sheets, which you want to be understandable from across the table.

There are three sheets worth cardboard bits in the game, including tracking tokens, stance rings, puzzle-cut stance tokens, activation tokens, character standups, stress tokens, and fatigue tokens (most of which I'll touch upon later). They're printed on medium-weight, linen-textured cardboard. Most of them are simple, but attractively designed status markers of various sorts. The one notable standout is the set of character standups. There are 49 of these in all, each featuring a very attractive piece of full-color artwork (drawn from the career sheets and other artwork in the set). They're a nice alternative to miniatures.

There are three foldup boxes. These are boxes that are used by players to hold everything that makes up their character. As you'll see this can include character sheets, action cards, talent cards, and a standup. Fantasy Flight pioneered the idea of a character box in its Road for Legend expansion to Descent and it works equally well here: it's a great way to store a character that's more than just a character sheet. The boxes made out of pretty thin cardstock, so I'm not ultimately sure how long they'll hold up, but for now they look quite nice.

The character sheets themselves are printed full-color on a heavy paper stock. Though the color makes them attractive, they were designed correctly, so that you'll always be printing on light pigment. The sheets do have one drawback, which is that the skill names are just a tiny bit hard to read because the weight of the type is a little low, but that's a nuisance, especially when compared to the overall nice design.

There about three dozen dice in WFRP3, including blue characteristic dice (d8), red reckless dice (d10), green conservative dice (d10), yellow expertise dice (d6), white fortune dice (d6), purple challenge dice (d8), and black misfortune dice (d6). Each of them features a variety of symbols, the most important of which are success, failure, bane, and boon. They're well printed, with very deep indents for the various icons. I did have an occasional trouble with boon symbols and success symbols being too similar for comfort on dice with very small printing (namely, the d10s), but I'm pretty sure I'd get used to them in time. Some good thought was put into the colors, and thus the red and green dice really make sense and link well with the stances used throughout the system.

Finally, you have the books. There are four of them total: a rulebook (96 pages); a GM book (96 pages); a wizard book (48 pages); and a priest book (48 pages). Each one is printed full-color on glossy paper and is filled with gorgeous artwork and plentiful sidebars and examples, all laid out beautifully. As artifacts, there's no question that these books are great.

I do have some organizational issues with them, which I'll talk about at the end of this section, while discussion of the contents will fill the latter half of this review.

If you want a more precise listing of what's what in the WFRP3 box, you should look at the FFG Card and Component list.

Their Purpose

So, now you now what the WFRP3 box contains. The next question is why? What's the purpose of having all of these bits, which you own't find in most other RPGs? I think there are four major benefits you can get from having components specifically designed for WFRP3:

It's Easy to Look at Complex Menus of Options. There are a lot of cards in WFRP3, and this is one of their main purposes.

Your character will have a set of cards representing actions he can take, particularly actions he can take in encounters (e.g., combat). Usually you'd have to scribble down a list of everything you can do on a character sheet--or worse you'd have to try and remember rules from the main rulebook for various wacky things you can do in combat, like "overrun" or "aid" or whatever. Instead WFRP3 just hands you a deck which you build out to your satisfaction and then can consult for use. It makes first-time play considerably easier and also ensures that you'll continue to think about your full menu of actions as the campaign progresses--rather than just falling back on a few favorites.

You also have cards for talents (and career abilities), which are more special powers--like feats--and which similarly keep your menu of options together and easy to see.

They Replace Book Lookups. As someone who has looked up the rules for "grapple" in the D&D 3.5E rulebooks about a jillion times, I have to say that complex rule lookups are annoying, even when you know exactly where something is and mostly what it says.

WFRP3 also resolves this problem with its cards. The rules for each of those actions and each of those talents are all right on the cards, usually in relatively standard formats (so, for example, it's easy to see what skill you have to use to conduct an action and when you can do it again, because those are printed in very standard places on the cards).

Besides its actions and talents, WFRP3 also replaces book lookups with cards in a few other ways. Careers (which are actually printed on larger sheets, as already noted) are mostly color, but they also list out how you'll be upgrading your character through experience.

The cards that I really adore, however, are the condition cards. There are 30 of them in the basic set, two each for 15 different conditions. If a character is blinded, demoralized, or frightened (or 12 other things), you just grab the card and hand it to the player. Not only is it quick to reference (and I'll here note how many times I've had to look up "shaken" and a few other conditions in D&D), but the player also has a visual reminder of the state change.

The insanity, miscast, and wound cards do something slightly different: they replace big random charts that you might roll on in a traditional RPG. Instead, when you go crazy, mess up a spell, or take a critical wound, you just grab a card. It's simpler, it doesn't require a book lookup, it gives you a permanent marker of a wound, and it makes it really easy to expand those "charts" out in the future to add more variety and color to your game (and in fact there are already a handful of new wound cards in the first WFRP3 supplement).

They Remind You of State. I've already touched upon how the various cards--particularly the conditions, insanities, wounds, and miscasts--can remind you of state. WFRP3 also has a bunch of cardboard chits which serve the same purpose even more. Now instead of constantly writing and erasing damage, you just grab cards to mark wounds, tokens to mark stress and fatigue, or tracking tokens to mark a variety of other stuff.

I think the most useful examples of state-remembrance are the puzzle-cut stance pieces (and the related stance rings which you put around your character markers), which allow you to maintain a precise tactical state. It's actually resource management--as I'll discuss more when I talk about the system--and the type of fairly precise resource management that you wouldn't really want to do with pen and paper.

They Provide Some Visceral Benefits. Finally, I think that good components can change your visceral experience of a game. For me, this shows up most clearly with the fortune (white) and misfortune (black) dice, which can slightly improve or reduce your chances of successfully using a characteristic or skill.

In a typical RPG you might give out small numerical bonuses or penalties for skill use during good or bad situations. For me, at least, this locks me into a very analytical way of thinking and it sort of stagnates my creativity, because I get too worried about making sure that I'm doling out the precise right modifiers. Using dice to represent the same sort of bonus or penalty feels entirely liberating to me, because I don't have to worry about getting the numbers precisely right. A die is itself random and thus its results will vary. I can't say how much it'll improve or hurt someone's chances at a skill. For me that's a real, visceral improvement, and I'm sure was one of the intended goals of the design.

I suspect other components have beneficial visceral effects. I think a character's stance meter might help the player get more into his current mood, for example and seeing the fortune tokens pile up on the party sheet probably makes you feel good about your roleplaying and your accomplishments (which are the things that might have awarded you those tokens). I'm pretty sure I'd see more as I played the game more.

Before closing out here on these "purposes", I should state clearly that these aren't the things that I think the game intended to do, but rather what I think it clearly does. The components offer a lot of benefits to gameplay, and in main, these are them.

Their Drawbacks

Before I start this final section, on drawbacks, I want to clearly state that I think that the physical design of WFRP3 is overall very successful. The designers have created components that dramatically improve ease of play and variability and that offer other aesthetic and visceral benefits.

However, there are some drawbacks as well. There are a couple that are just the nature of the beast and a couple that I think are missteps in this very ambitious design.

It Takes a Lot of Space. This is the first element that you can't get around. I'm used to my RPGs taking up a lot of space, between battle maps, miniatures, dice, and piles of books. But WFRP3 surprised even me--particularly because each player had a whole set of cards and sheets spread out around him. Don't expect to play this game in your comfy chairs or on a small table.

It Doesn't Support Many Players. This is another "nature of the beast" element, but the one that bugs me the most. As it ships, WFRP3 really only supports 1 GM and 3 players. This is immediately obvious because there are only 3 decks of the basic player action cards. There are similarly only 3 boxes to hold characters. Most of the other elements will give you enough bits for maybe 4 players, but even then they start to get tight. The pieces for the stance meters and the stance rings were what came closest to running out next when I tried out the game.

Because of the size of my gaming group, I actually had trouble getting together few enough people to be able to run a review play. I'm sure there are other groups who'll have similar problems. My playtest actually ended up with 4 players, and we were able to squeak by, though I had to ask two players to share their basic action cards. We talked a bit about playing a full campaign in the future, and came to the conclusion that we'd have to buy a second set of the WFRP3 box to do so. I'd much prefer it if FFG put out a $10 or so small box which gave one player everything he needed.

It's Not Well Referenced. One of the drawbacks of having many of your rules on cards is that they're then not in a central rulebook. You can get around this if you duplicate the information from the cards in your rulebook, but WFRP3 opts not to, which I think is a mistake.

I don't necessarily need to have a reference for all the wounds, mishaps, and insanities. But I find it a bit frustrating as a GM that I don't have a central list of conditions. What was really troublesome, however, was the fact that the talents and actions aren't referenced anywhere. That means that every player had to pick through every card when making his character to decide what he wanted. Short summaries in the rulebook would have resolved this issue considerably. FFG has been very proactive about supplementing WFRP3 with online resources, so I have some hope that they'll make some summaries for the cards and resolve this issue at some point in the future.

The Dice Don't Do It For Me. As of Yet. My top criteria for dice in a game is that the results of a role should be immediately exciting. I think that most RPGs succeed at this because you can immediately see the results of a roll and know if you've failed or succeeded.

Throughout our first game no one could quickly assess the results of a WFRP3 die roll. The mixtures of successes, failures, boons, and banes was just too much of a muddle to quickly note whether something failed or succeeded. I think the boons and the successes looking pretty similar made this worse. Mind you, it wasn't a long-term problem because we could pretty quickly count up the results, but we were still robbed of that brief moment of excitement when the results of the dice were revealed.

I say "As of Yet" because it's possible that we could become quicker at immediately reading the results of a roll through additional play. I note the issue, nonetheless, because I'm not convinced this is the case.

The Rules Have Organizational Problems. Here's my most serious problem with the components that isn't just a natural result of the way that Fantasy Flight decided to do things. I found it somewhat hard to learn the games from the rules. This was typically due to the fact that there were issues in rules organization--most frequently that a rule would be introduced briefly somewhere in the rules other than where related rules were discussed or that a term would be referenced in the rules before it had been explained.

To offer an example, I found dice pools to be poorly explained. These are an entirely core mechanic that explain what dice you throw when making a skill test. The actual rules are introduced over the course of about four pages, from 40-43 of the main rulebook, where you learn about characteristic dice, stance dice, fortune dice, misfortune dice, and challenge dice. The idea of NPCs having "adversary dice" is touched upon here, but you have to read the Tome of Adventure to discover that those are actually misfortune dice. Most frustrating, the section on dice pools doesn't touch upon expertise dice at all, though there's an example that uses one (and which entirely confounded me as a result). The rules for those dice (and in fact, all the rules for using skills in dice pools) turned out to be on page 16; I didn't find them until my second read through.

There were a couple of other rules which flummoxed me on my first read through WFRP3. I didn't understand what was intended when skills were opposed by a target defense (and I was clearly not the only one, because that question made it into a FAQ). When I finally started looking at the cards, I had to puzzle over the "active defenses", like dodge, parry, and block, because nothing in the rules had indicated that the players might have essentially "free" defensive actions. The experience rules were also quite opaque to me on a first read through (and in fact remained opaque until I reread them while working on this review).

I do feel like this issue was worse than what I see in most RPGs. The rulebooks could really be improved by some blind playtesting and revision of the rules based on that. However, I also felt like I reached the 95% understanding level that I expect to have with a new RPG when I read most of the rules a second time. I just don't think I should have had to do that. Mind you, there was plenty in the rules that was perfectly clear too, especially when the examples were on the point for the more difficult topics (which was not always the case). There were just enough major rule points that confused me to leave me feeling a bit at sea on my first read through the rules.

Rating the Components

With that all said, I'm ready to give a Style rating for WFRP3 which primarily covers the components and how they work. I have no doubt that the entire set of bits is well-produced and beautiful. I also feel that the components generally supplement the roleplaying system, making it easier to play in useful ways, which is of course exactly what you'd want them to do.

The only major complaint I have about the system is usability. For the cards, there's been some good work done to make it easy to see a few major elements, such as types and recharge times. However, I think it unfortunate that the designers didn't go out to the icon-rich language of Eurogames (and even some FFG releases). Having standard icons for things like stress, fatigue, and other major game elements would have made it so much easier to recognize what these cards did at a glance. However, that's an error of omission, not a problem with what FFG actually opted to produce.

My issues with the organization of some elements of the rulebook are more substantive. I've already discussed that in some depth.

Finally, I feel that the 3-player limitation of the game is generally limiting, but that's something that an individual GM can assess for himself when considering WFRP3 for his play group.

Overall, I've marked Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Third Edition as a low "5" out out of "5" for Style. Despite its issues, the overall package is so innovative and so beautiful in its component design that you can't help but let it eke in the top mark in the Style category.

Is It a Board Game?

Before I close out on the components discussion, I want to briefly touch upon one of the biggest arguments concerning the WFRP3. Upon seeing the initial videos, a lot of people claimed that it was a board game, rather than an RPG.

I'll offer my opinion on the argument, having played the game: I pretty strongly disagree with the claim. WFRP3 is a roleplaying game by every criteria that I'd use define a RPG. It just happens to be an RPG that has components specifically designed to attempt to improve the gameplay. However, the difference between that and what D&D does is only in where the components are packaged. For your D&D4 game, you might well use a Gamemastery initiative tracker, some Litko condition markers, and Wizards of the Coast power cards. Instead, WFRP3 packages that initiative track, those condition markers, those power cards, and a bunch of other things all in the main RPG box.

I will agree that WFRP3 has learned some lessons from board games. I suspect the design of the action cards remembers lessons learned from CCGs and other modern card games. The ideas for the stress and fatigue tokens could well have come from Descent, ditto the special WFRP3 dice. But I certainly don't think that learning lessons from another genre of games means that you're suddenly a part of that genre.

In my mind, it's an RPG with bits, as simple as that.

I've also heard the somewhat similar argument that WFRP3 dumbs down its RPG system to fit onto cards. I don't think you could actually make that argument with a straight face if you've played the game. WFRP3 does use a pretty well-defined and consistent core system, and it is pretty easy to lay out a specific instance of that system on a single card, but I see a system that's consistent enough to allow that as a virtue, not a flaw. I certainly saw more depth in the one session of WFRP3 that I've played than in the majority of my D&D3.5e sessions that I've played over the last few years. I mean, in the WFRP3 game, a character actually got to take out an opponent with a social skill in the middle of combat. A game that allows that type of variety can't be that simple in my book.

The Game System

Having pretty exhaustively gone over the components of WFRP3, I now want to look at the game system in perhaps a bit less depth. As I just said, I find it a nicely polished system. It's got a few novel elements, but generally WFRP3 depends much more upon the innovation of its components than the innovation of its mechanics.

Modeling the Character

Any RPG starts off with characters, so what do characters look like in WFRP3?

The Character Model: The character sheet is printed on a double-sided sheet of paper that's about half-the size of a normal piece of paper. As you'd guess by that, characters are pretty compact (though that's partially because some info is handed off to other component). In main, they're defined by five things: characteristics, skills, actions, talents, and stance.

Characteristics. There are six characteristics, three of them mental (strength, toughness, and agility) and three of them mental (intelligence, willpower, and fellowship). Each tends to be valued at 2 or more, perhaps as high as 4 or 5 for a starting character. Some characteristics might have fortune dice associated with them, which are like fractional points.

Characteristics are, as you'll see, the largest measure of whether you're successful at the things you do.

Skills. There are two types of skills: basic skills which everyone can use and advanced skills which you must learn before you can use them. Each skill is associated with a characteristic and can optionally include one or more levels of training. You can also specialize skills in specific subareas.

Actions. These are the things that you can do during an encounter. Every character has a set of basic actions, which include hand-to-hand attacks, ranged attacks, blocking, parrying, and more. You can also buy additional actions when you create your character and later through experience. These represent extra special things you can do. They might be special fighting maneuvers, special social actions, or spells.

Each action tends to list a specific characteristic roll that's required to take the action and lists some special results for boons, banes, and other special die results, all of which I'll discuss later.

Talents. These are special bonus powers that your character has. Some are always active, while others must be exhausted to use--but doing so doesn't require an action.

There are also some special rules for how talents work: you can only have a few "active" at a time and you can alternatively make them available to the rest of the characters through the party sheet. I'm not that convinced by these mechanics, because they feel more game-y to me than anything else in the RPG, but the idea of lending your talents to the party, presumably through strong leadership, is pretty neat.

Stance. This is one of the most unique elements in WFRP3. Part of your character model defines how reckless or conservative your character can be. As we'll see, this effects a lot different things in the game.

Other Model ELements. Your character is also defined by a lot of more transitory elements, among them wounds, fatigue, stress, equipment, encumbrance, money, insanities, and critical wounds. I won't get into the details, except to say that the components of the game allow it to support a lot more variety in these various states (as I've alluded to already) and also provide for a lot more tactical resource management than is typical for an RPG (as I've promised I'll discuss).

Character Creation: WFRP3 supports very simple point-based character creation. You choose a race and a career (semi-randomly), then you get an allocation of points. Most of them are spent on characteristics, but you can also buy wealth, skills, action cards, and talent cards.

Though the creation is pretty simple, it can also take some time, since players will be paging through many cards for their actions and talents. I've already talked about my desire for some nice categorized summaries here.

Character Advancement: Each player starts the game out with a career, which could be anything from Burgher to Zealot. This career largely determines advancement.

Advancement points are gained at the end of each adventure. You can then spend them on a couple of different sorts of advancement.

For each career, you can take up to 10 relatively cheap career advancements, four of which are set (action card, talent, skill training or specialty, wound threshold), the other of which are open. You can also train a characteristic as part of a career, though it takes multiple advancements. To qualify for these cheaper advancements, you have to draw from talents, skills, and characteristics supports by the career. When you've used up all 10 of a career's slots, then you transition into something new, probably something somewhat similar (because it costs advancements to move from one career to another, and it's cheaper when they're alike).

You can also take advances in non-career skills and talents, which doesn't count for your 10 career advancement slots and which is more expensive.

In this way, you can increase all of your abilities as the game goes on.

The Party Model: One particularly innovative element of WFRP3 is the party sheet, which defines what type of party the PCs are and also gives them some special powers. I don't think we ever remembered to use the party special power while playing our review game, but I loved the fact that the players defined their relationship to each other (as intrepid explorers, as it happens) via this sheet.

Task Resolution

The game system centers on a simple core mechanic which uses dice pools modified by stance to resolve tasks.

Stances: Stance is measured by a meter which depicts a spectrum from reckless to conservative. At the start of the game, each character will have a 4-space "stance meter", which measures conservative ability and reckless ability as a distance from a norm. An average character might have two conservative and two reckless spaces, while a fervent warrior might have three reckless spaces and one conservative space and a studious scholar might have three conservative spaces and one reckless space.

During an encounter you can shift your current stance one space in either direction for round--or move it more points by expending stress.

Stance immediately has one more effect: all action cards are double-sided, with one side for when the character is in an reckless stance and the other for when he's conservative. Many cards have slightly different results for the two sides.

Stance also modifies the contents of a dice pool.

Dice Pool: Any task in WFRP3 is defined by two things: what characteristic (and skill) you're using and what you're being opposed by.

The standard construction of the positive aspects of a dice pool work like this:

• You create a pool with a number of characteristic dice equal to the appropriate characteristic.
• You then substitute some of those characteristic dice for reckless dice (which are more likely to tire you out) or conservative dice (which are more likely to take extra time), depending on your current stance.
• You add fortune dice if you have fortune points in the characteristic.
• If you've trained the skill, you add expertise dice.
• If you've specialized the skill in a way that's appropriate for the test, you add a fortune dice.

The negative side of the dice pool is determined by 0-4 challenge dice and 0 or more misfortune dice. Challenge dice usually define how difficult something is from simple (0 dice) or easy (1 die) to daunting (4 dice). Misfortune dice represent nuisances and penalties.

Sometimes you'll instead be doing an opposed check and that has more precise rules for when you add challenge dice and misfortune dice based upon relative skill levels (and they're rules that I find fairly unintuitive, especially compared to the intuitiveness of much of the rest of the game).

When you've assembled your dice pool--and it'll come pretty quickly after working with it just a few times--you roll them.

Interpreting a Dice Roll: There are four main symbols on dice: successes, failures, banes, and boons.

Successes and failures offset each other. If you have more successes than failures, you were successful at the task. Sometimes if you have multiple successes, you might have an especially good result. This doesn't tend to be the case with normal skill rolls, but action cards often have multi-success results printed on them.

Banes and boons also offset each other. Remaining banes or boons (whichever you have) can be used to "power" bane and boon results on your various cards. Action cards, again, tend to have bane and boon results printed on them.

You'll note that WFRP3 somewhat uniquely allows you to succeed at a test in a bad way (successful with banes) or to fail at a task with good side effects (failure with boons).

Combat: Combat is built around many of the systems already described. First up, you can move your stance meter.

Then you can take one maneuver--or more if you want to spend fatigue. Among other things, maneuvering can be used to change where you are. Locations are surprisingly abstract in WFRP3, mainly laid out as abstract range bands. I'm actually not convinced it works, as we had some issues modeling distances between different areas in a 2-dimensional plain. Well, I say troubles, but it was actually quite easy to make judgements about ranges between those two-dimensional locales, it just felt awkward. It might grow more natural with time.

Finally, you can take one action (usually an attack), which you do by activating an action card--either one of the basics, or one from your special supply. Many more complex actions require recharge time, which means that you put markers on the card and take them off at the end of each round; when they're all cleared, you can use the action again.

Damage is marked by wound cards. Cleverly, you use the backside of the wound card for normal wounds, but if a critical wound occurs (which is most likely to happen by applying a number of boons to turn a wound into a critical), then you just flip a wound card over and apply the unique result on the front.

Because of the fairly open-ended style of action-card usage, there are actually opportunities to use non-combat actions in combat. As I noted earlier, in our playtest a friendly merchant was able to bring down a beastman by applying a social skill: he yelled at him, caused a point of stress, which automatically turned into a wound, and the beastman went over.

I should also briefly touch upon initiative before I leave combat behind: it's another neat if small innovation. The players all roll initiative and then each time the initiative tracker gets around to one of those rolls, the players decide who should go in that spot (with each player still only going once per round, of course). It's a nice bit of social interplay mated with another good bit of tactics.

Resource Management: I've been promising to talk about resource management for a while, now. It appears in several different ways in WFRP3.

You've already seen a few references now to stress and fatigue. There are secondary status scores that can give you penalty dice if you accumulate too many. They also mark a very nice bit of resource management in WFRP3, as you can decide how and when to use them to accomplish various beneficial effects, and likewise you can choose when and how to get them back. They're pretty simple, but their inclusion offers some additional tactical play that can make combats (and other sorts of encounters) that much more interesting.

The stance meter marks another element of resource management, as pushing it toward reckless can easily increase fatigue, while pushing it toward conservative can easily up refresh costs of items, so it's another thing that you have to figure out.

The Progress Tracker: There are several other minor mechanics in WFRP3 that I'm not going to go into, but I thought there was one which deserved some additional attention: the progress tracker.

The concept is pretty simple. It's just a track that tends to have somewhere between 4 and 10 spaces and which often has a halfway marker. It's used to mark all sorts of multi-step progresses, such as when cavalry arrives, how well PCs are doing at seeking out clues, that sort of thing.

I find its most interesting use as a focus for what other games call an "extended contest": you and an opponent are both running along the track, trying to get to the end first. The online demo adventure uses it to model an extended social contest, as the players argue with a merchant, while the adventure included in the WFRP3 box uses it to track the status of an investigation. There are numerous other possible uses listed in the GM book. I don't find the core idea that innovative, but it's a rare game that actually uses this sort of thing as a core gaming mechanic, and I think it'll serve to continually vary WFRP3 games as long as gamemasters and scenario writers make use of it.

What's Particularly Novel?

Because so much about the components of WFRP3 are innovative, I think it worthwhile to briefly comment on some of the more innovative elements coming out of the mechanics as well. Even though I said at the start of this section that a lot of design of the game was pretty standard, there are still some novel mechanics of note.

• Careers. I'm aware that these are derived from previous additions of the game, but still there aren't many RPGs out there that allow for such a wide variety of occupations, nor are there many games that envision characters finishing occupations, then needing to move on to others.
• Party. This is the first game I'm aware of that mechanically defines how a party works together (though HeroQuest moves in that direction with its hero bands). I think it's a great game focus.
• Stances. To a certain extent, this is just one of the many resources that you manage, but deciding that actions had different effects depending on your stance is pretty brilliant.
• Recharging. Recharging has been around for quite a while, but this is the first game that I know of that did them right, by fully integrating the concept into the game, so that you remember to recharge things as you go (rather than just scribbling onto your white board when powers are available again, as I do in D&D 3.5e, to somewhat limited success).
• Talents. The idea of keeping up just a few always-on powers and storing others for later use feels like an inheritance from another type of game and definitely isn't an element of most RPGs (unless you consider it an abstraction of prepping with spells like you do in D&D and other games). The idea that these same powers can be moved over to a party sheet to apply to everyone is even more innovative.
• Complex Results. I can't think of any other games where you could fail well or succeed badly. Adding a second dimension to its task results adds a lot of dimension to WFRP3's tasks.

(Someone will undoubtedly point out that my superlative description of some of these innovations is incorrect, and there have been precedents. Everything in the world has been done already, as some folks say. So let me state generally that I'm highlighting things which I don't believe have entered the general streams of game design, even if they have been seen once before in this indie design, that small-press book, or even that one mainstream game.)

The Game Design

So I've talked a lot about what's innovative and what's interesting in the WFRP3, but I haven't talked yet about whether I like it or not. The short answer is: I do. Here's some of my main thoughts on the topic:

Components: Though I've already rated the quality and usefulness of the components, a lot of their appeal arises when you consider the fact that they make the actual play of the game better. I've already talked about how it's easier to reference things and how the system allows for more variability. Fantasy Flight Games, Jay Little, and everyone else involved in the game have done a truly superior job of improving an RPG through its bits.

There is, of course, a flipside to this. I did feel overwhelmed at times by all the bits, because there were just so many of them and they were all over. When you get to that point the same components that otherwise benefit you can slow the game down.

On balance, though, there's far more good than bad.

Tactical Management: The other thing that I really adored about the game is its possibilities for tactical management. I've already talked about this too, when I discussed stress, fatigue, and stance. Overall, however, it's something that can let players make important decisions every turn, and thus let encounters be something more than just hit-the-monster.

Ease of Play: Although I don't feel that WFRP3 has been dumbed down, I do feel that it's a good, clean, consistent game system. I suspect it might actually be a pretty good entry game, because once a player has the couple of core concepts down, everything else appears on his cards. It sounds to me like a great way to teach an RPG to newcomers (though its remains perfectly interesting for us oldtimers too).

GM Support: Finally, I'll mention a topic I haven't covered much: I think the game does a pretty good job of supporting GMs. That starts out with the progress tracker that I've already mentioned. However, the Tome of Adventure--the GM book that I haven't really discussed yet--contains about 40 pages just about how to run the game. Beyond that, I've already mentioned how viscerally easy it is to throw out fortune and misfortune dice to reward or penalize players. All said, this is a lot of small stuff, but it adds up, and I think it adds up to to the GM's strong benefit.

Overall, I wouldn't exactly say that there's anything in the game design of WFRP3 that makes it sing, but there are a lot of good, well-polished systems that make the game easy and fun to play, which is largely what I want in a mainstream gaming system.

Content: The Rest of the Book(s)

Before I close up, I'm going to briefly mention the contents of all four books:

The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Rulebook mainly contains the rules I've broadly outlined here. There's also a section on (fairly abstract) equipment and a short 13-page overview of the Empire. The background probably isn't enough to feel really comfortable running a Warhammer campaign in the default setting, but it's a good enough start.

The Tome of Adventure is the aforementioned GM's book. The GM advice is remarkably indie feeling with discussion of three-act structure, say "yes", and more. I've personally heard a lot of this before, but I was very happy to see it in this book, especially because it was specifically related to the WFRP3 rules. There's also a very beautiful bestiary, which gives a wide variety of monster categories, along with three specifics of each (at different difficulty levels); thus, for example, you get three sorts of beastmen (not even including rules for using even weaker minions). The book ends with a very solid-looking adventure, which involves investigation and socialization as much as it does combat.

The last two books are the Tome of Blessings and Tome of Mysteries, which cover priests and magic respectively. There is a huge amount of background in each of these books plus advice on playing the character types; the rules are just 5-6 pages in each 48-page book. I'm personally not sure this was the best usage of that 80 or so pages in the core rule package, but the material that's here is good.

On the whole I think the design and contents of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Third Edition are quite good, and so I've given them a "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Third Edition is a bold and innovative new entry to the roleplaying field. The ways in which components have been specifically designed for the game work well, pulling together a lot of design which other companies depend on third-party accessories for, and making it an integral part of a core game release.

Though the mechanical design of WFRP3 isn't quite as high-flying as its physical design, there's still a lot to like, resulting in a definitively above-average game.

Overall, I suspect WFRP3 will be a superb game for new roleplayers to cut their teeth on, and it's definitely got enough depth for us grognards to enjoy it as well. After my playtest session, WFRP3 went on my own list as one of two or three possibilities to offer up to my players when our current (D&D3.5) campaign ends.