WFRP 4th Edition Review Pt2 – Careers

Continuing the review of the newest incarnation of Warhammer Fantantasy Roleplay, hot on the heels of Character Creation (Found here), we delve into what many veteran players feel is a defining feature of WFRP – the Careers.

Careers
Each career represents a prepackaged set of options for you to choose when spending XP to develop your character, and in principle nothing has changed.

But as soon as you dig deeper, you will find things have changed quite significantly. The first is the reintroduction of Classes, a concept in 1st Edition that was dropped in 2nd. Career Class has little effect in the grand scheme of things unless you decide to change to a career from a different class, in which case there is a higher XP cost.

In 1st and 2nd, Careers were split into Basic and Advanced, and you could enter any Basic career at any time for 100xp, otherwise you had to complete your current career before you could move through an Exit into the next. That required you to buy all available characteristic advancements, skills and (in the case of 2nd Edition) Talents.

However, in 4th Edition you never actually complete a career in the same way as previously. Now you need to meet certain requirements before you can move onto the next phase of your career; the term “complete” is still used, but technically, you never need to leave a career as there is no limit on how many advances you can take that are available to you.

Career Levels
This is the major change to careers. the Basic/Advanced split is gone and in its place are Careers with Levels. Previously, each career had a number of Career Exits that made narrative sense.

For example, the first Wizard Career (Apprentice Wizard) had a number of exits, but one of those was Journeyman Wizard, which fed into Master Wizard and that into Wizard Lord. A logical progression if you wanted to go that way. But each was a separate career on its own.

Some careers presented a clear and logical progression towards a goal better than others. Wizard, Warrior Priest, Slayer, Soldier for example, all had clear directions. But if you started as a Rat Catcher or Beggar, your career path could be far more defined by what you do within a campaign. While you can still wander around within your career class in a similar way, the Levels within a career now represent the various levels of expertise or experience within that broad career description.

This means the logical career progression has been combined into a single group, with the formerly separate careers becoming the aforementioned Levels within a singular Career – the Wizard Career for example, has the levels Apprentice Wizard, Wizard, Master Wizard and Wizard Lord.

This applies across every career in 4th Edition, so some of the classic careers from the earlier editions, are now a Level within a particular career. Judicial Champion for example, is now the fourth level of the Duelist career, Zealot is within the Flagellant career.

Despite this, those levels are going to be familiar to veterans of the system. Each career has an advance scheme detailing which six Characteristics you can increase, and each level has a selection of Skills and Talents you can buy. However, only three of those characteristics are available at Level 1, with each subsequent level granting one additional characteristic you can advance.

In order to move up a Level, you need to complete your current one. You are required to take a certain number of characteristic and skill advances dependent on what level you are in. Once you have done that, you get to spend 100xp to move to the next level, or indeed, Level 1 of any career within your Career Class. If you want to move out of your Class you can, but it costs an additional 100xp.

Previously, there was a set amount you could improve your characteristics from your career. Once you had taken all of them (in 1st Ed this was on increments of 10, and in 2nd it 5), you couldn’t improve them any further without changing your career. 4th Edition makes two changes here. First you increase your characteristics in single digits, and second the limit has been moved. This means you can potentially remain at Level 1 of your career, and increase your available characteristics as far as you want, without becoming stagnated.

The same applies to skills. In 1st Edition, you either had the skill, or didn’t. In 2nd Edition, you could take a skill up to three times. In 4th, you can buy as many ranks in a skill as you desire. So once again, you could remain a Level 1 Beggar for an entire campaign, but you would be able to become the Empire’s greatest Beggar.

This is actually an interesting change from the earlier editions. The mechanics from the first two editions were essentially identical to each other, but the new system in 4th adds a certain level of flexibility and focus to your character, allowing you to develop further in your chosen field.

If you consider each Level within each Career to be comparable to a single Career in earlier editions, you come out with 256 options in 64 careers, over 2nd Editions 112 and 1st Editions ~99 (not including those that were in supplements).

Social Standing

The Career Levels also come with a Social Standing score, another new mechanic that will bolster Roleplaying potential, because it governs how NPCs will react to and treat PCs of different social levels. As you move up Levels, your social position also changes, and certain Careers have a significantly higher starting status than others.

This social score is broken down into three Tiers (Brass, Silver and Gold), and within each is your Standing rated between 1 and 5. Giving a total of 15 levels of society to play with. Generally, those of a higher tier and standing will look down on those of lower levels, but there are some grey areas in there as detailed in the book, with low level silver NPCs potentially looking more kindly on high level brass characters.

This mechanic also governs how much money you can earn by “doing your job” within the game.I think this is a nice addition, it lifts some of the restrictions that sometimes caused stagnation in the earlier versions. More freedom will allow players to really develop their characters in more depth, rather than being forced into a particular stereotype. It is also nice to see there are no rules saying you must acquire the trappings of the career you wish to enter, before you qualify to enter it. Previously this could cause major problems when you simply couldn’t get the trappings you needed, due to situation, location or lack of funds, meaning you got stuck with no way to improve your characteristics short of entering a career (at a cost) away from the one you wanted.

Overall, this new system is going to be very familiar to anyone who has played WFRP before, mechanically is retains all the cues and beats of the earlier editions, but has seen some significant fettling to grant a greater range of choices for players. It feels more relaxed and fluid, with some clever new additions that could be useful for a GM, but at the same time can be ignored if a particular group feels they get in the way.