WFRP 4th Edition Review Part 5 – Combat

Having covered the core mechanic in WFRP in the previous article, we now take a look at the Combat rules. Regardless of whether you love or hate combat in an RPG, it is going to find you in the Old World, and it’s going to be bloody…Unless you run purely social focused WFRP games, you are going to find yourself hitting someone or something with something heavy at some point. Even if you do run social games, it’s almost certainly going to happen eventually. WFRP is a lot more like Game of Thrones than anyone is likely to admit.

The Old Way
In 1st and 2nd Edition, combat followed the Simple Test mechanic as detailed in the last article. You want to hit someone with your Melee weapon? Weapon Skill test. Shoot someone with your bow? Ballistic Skill test. If you succeeded, you then rolled for damage – in 1st that was a D6, and in 2nd it was a D10. For Melee you added your strength, and for Ranged attacks the weapon’s damage, to that die roll, to determine how much damage you inflicted. The unfortunate target (which was often yourself), then reduced that by their armor and toughness, and the remaining damage (if any) was the number of wounds you took. Super simple.

The New Way
I’m going to look at each step of combat separately, because quite a bit has had a significant but subtle change.

Initiative
In pretty much every RPG, when you get into combat you need to determine in what order the involved parties act. 1st Edition characters had an Initiative characteristic, and it was a fixed value. 2nd Edition dropped this in favour of a variable number: Agility +1D10. It didn’t give a huge variance, and if your opponent’s Agility was 10 or more better than yours, you would always be acting after them.

Fourth Edition returns to the same method 1st used, a set and fixed Initiative Characteristic. And quite frankly, it sucks. How many times have you been in a position where it makes mose sense for you to act early, but are stuck with the last slot? Purists will likely not give it two thoughts, but personally I will be houseruling to incorporate the principles in FFG’s Star Wars (and subsequently Genesys – ironically, both descendants of WFRP 3rd Edition), where the initiative slots are shared, allowing anyone on a particular side to use any allied slot that makes sense in the moment. Since this is a contentious topic and further consideration will be getting off topic, let’s move on…

Making an Attack
In 4th Edition, on top of your Weapon and Ballistic skill characteristics, you also now have a Melee Skill and a variety of skills for various Ranged weapons. This adds a whole plethora of options to focus your proficiency on, as well as a means for a GM to throw a few wrenches into the machine. Attacking in Melee in 4th Edition appears similar to its earlier incarnations, but there are changes. Every Melee attack is now an Opposed Test, with both parties making a Melee check (using their Weapon Skill characteristic and the skill ranks for their weapon). Whoever comes out with the most SLs, wins. This makes a certain amount of sense, the ability of both combatants is taken into account, but also means some really lucky (depending on your point of view) rolls could mean that lowly goblin actually managed to deal some damage to the verteran soldier.

Ranged combat is not an Opposed Test (you are not pitting your skill directly against another), unless of course you have a Shield, in which case you oppose it with Melee (who wouldn’t hide behind their shield under a hail of arrows?). This also makes sense, but in a slightly more abstract way.

Hit Locations
Where you hit your opponent has been an aspect of WFRP forever, and virtually nothing has changed. You take the results on your 2D10 after a successful attack and reverse them. This new number corresponds to a particular location on your opponent – Head, Body, Left or Right Arm or Leg. The only issue this throws up, is when you are attacking something that has more than four limbs, or multiple heads, or otherwise does not conform to a four-limbed creature. But that’s always been a thing, and it’s never really caused a problem. The only change to earlier editions are the number ranges assigned to the body parts. But few are likely to notice that unless the prior ranges have been burned into their memories. While many systems don’t worry about hit locations, Warhammer always has, and it’s nice to see this return.

Advantage
Advantage is another new thread: when you win a combat check, you gain +1 Advantage, and for every point of Advantage you have accumulated, you can add 10 to your relevant characteristic. So for every round of combat you win, you improve your chances of winning the following round. On the surface it suggests that as soon as you start winning, winning becomes a certainty. However, as soon as you lose a combat check, you also lose all your Advantage. So while you might have your opponent on the back foot one moment, the tables could turn on you in the blink of an eye. How very Warhammer.

Damage
4th Edition has a fairly surprising change here. Cubicle7 have done away with the damage roll entirely, and instead turned to their Success Level mechanic (see previous article). Assuming you won the Opposed test, the number of SLs you got on that roll determines what you add to your Strength (in the case of Melee) or the weapon damage (for Ranged) to define how much damage you deal. This actually makes some sense; the lower you roll (which can be interpreted as the further from failure you are), the more SLs you have and the more damage you deal. You still reduce damage by your Toughness and Armor, and shields are still considered weapons (as they were in 2nd Edition), rather than purely defensive ‘toughness’ boosts they were in 1st Edition.

Actions
First Edition didn’t have anything special to structure combat, you declared what you wanted, the GM told you if you could or not and what skill or check was required, and that was it. Fighting was a straight hack’n’slash affair. Second attempted to add some tactical thinking to the pot, by introducing a range of Full and Half Actions. In a given turn you could do two Half actions or one Full action, which made players put more thought into what they were actually doing. Fourth Edition sits somewhere in the middle; you can Move and you can take an Action, but there are no lists of actions as there were in 2nd Edition – it’s more like 1st in its lack of structure beyond “Attacking” or “Casting.”

Critical Hits and Fumbles
In 1st and 2nd Edition, Critical hits only happened when you reduced your opponent to 0 wounds. Fourth Edition allows you to cause a Critical Wound when you roll a double on a successful attack. (More on those in the next article)

A Fumble is when you fail a check and roll a double, resulting in something extra happening beside the annoyance of missing your target. These are typically small irritants rather than major effects, but they add a certain level of detail that is appreciated, especially when combats can sometimes boil down to a very robotic “roll, hit, hurt, repeat” monotony.

Other Bits
There is a plethora of additional rules covering movement in combat, two weapon fighting, grappling, unarmed combat, misfires on black powder weapons, and a large list of difficulty modifiers, but too much detail for this particular article, and nothing out of the ordinary that hasn’t appeared in pretty much every RPG.

Overall, the foundations remain the same, but the structure above has more ornamentation than a Temple of Sigmar. It’s going to be really familiar to the old school players, but the changes might take a little getting used to. It does feel like Cubicle 7 have made some significant effort to add flexibility to what is essentially a really simple system and bring it up to date, while retaining the legacy that is WFRP,  how it stands up is anyone’s guess right now.