WFRP 4th Edition Review Pt3 – Skills, Talents and Advancement

Following our look at the Careers in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, we now delve into the other half of what defines your character, and how to develop them into the anti-heros we all know they don’t want to be…

Skills

Skills are in pretty much every Roleplaying Game: they help define what your character is good at and Warhammer is no different. On the whole, very little has changed over the editions. In 1st Edition, you either had the skill or you didn’t, there was no in between. If you had the skill you could attempt to make a check with that skill. If you didn’t, you couldn’t. All very simple – but somewhat limiting.

With 2nd Edition, the skills were split into Basic and Advanced. Anyone could attempt a Basic skill check, even if they didn’t have any ranks, but at a negative modifier, while Advanced skills required you to have taken the skill in question. It also introduced the concept of Skill Mastery – you could take any given skill up to three times. The first rank allowed you to attempt a check (without the negative modifier if it was a basic skill), the second gave you a +10 to your check, and the third a +20. This granted greater freedom of customisation to your characters: it felt very much like DnD and did away with some of the limitations. Fourth Edition follows suit, but takes it to the next level.

As before, every skill is associated with a particular characteristic, but skills are now ranked and can be taken as many times as you want. The only limitation is the choice of skills you can improve based on your current career. You can buy as many ranks as you desire, and you add your ranks in a skill to your characteristic to determine the target on your dice roll. This really gives some great customisation options to your character, allowing you to focus on a couple of core skills to really make you the master of your trade. Of those skills, many will be very familiar to any veteran of the setting, but what stands out are the Melee and Ranged skills (which are in turn broken down into various weapon types), indicating a potentially large change to the way combat works.

Talents

Talents were introduced in 2nd Edition, where they provided some special abilities not covered by general skills, similar (I believe) to Feats in DnD. Some Talents are limited to a particular race, but most are part and parcel with your Career. Unlike 2nd Edition some Talents are ranked, where they give you a greater bonus depending on how many times you have taken them. Magic and Miracles are entirely dependent on a few Talents, as they are required in order to gain access to your Spells and Prayers, which is a departure from the prior editions where it was based on a skill.

Advancement

Spending your experience points to advance your character in the earlier editions was a simple and straightforward affair. You spent 100xp, and you bought a single advancement on your characteristics profile (that being a +10 in first edition, or +5 in second), or you bought a skill or a talent (assuming any of the above were available in your current career). If you had finished your career (meaning you had taken all available Skills, Talents and Characteristic increases), you could also spend 100xp to move into a career your current one had an exit into. Or if you wanted to really change where you were headed, 200xp got you a brand new basic career. Everything was in 100xp lumps, which carried on from 1st into 2nd editions. Fourth changes everything up once again.

Characteristics, those available to you as determined by your career level, now increase in increments of one as opposed to the earlier 10 or 5, but the cost to increase these has changed significantly, depending on how many advances you have previously taken. Skills advance in exactly the same way, albeit at a lower cost. Talents are the only ones that retain the 100xp price tag, and for ranked Talents, it’s an additional 100xp per the number of times you have taken that Talent before.

This self-regulation means your improvement will slow down as you get better, and prevent you monstering your character too early. Indeed, when it comes to characteristics the system breaks down your advances into brackets of 5, with the first 5 advances costing you 25xp each and with every bracket of 5 the cost increases with ever-larger costs. Taking that characteristic advance 30 times? The next 5 are going to cost you 120xp, EACH! That’s pretty steep, but when you factor in the way skills work now, 30+ increases on your characteristic, and 30+ ranks in a skill, on top of a 30ish starting characteristic… well that’s 90+, and potentially in excess of 100. On a D100 roll? Wow. That sounds insane. And broken, especially when you look at how far you could take your characteristics in the earlier editions, where they naturally capped out at about 70. But there are changes to the core mechanic that should go some way to explain why it isn’t.

Of course, the options to advance your character are limited by what’s available in your current career: while skills from career levels you have already completed remain available to take, Talents do not. So you really need to think carefully before moving on, just in case you want to take that Talent once more, or open up new avenues of greatness.

But this does work when you look at the way the system had been changed for skill checks, which I will cover in the next article. What it really does do, is give you a much greater impression of customization, personalization, and individualism to your characters, rather than the former “tick-box” feel you could get if you had a similar character type in your group. Overall, it’s an interesting change, I don’t know what kind of longevity it will add to characters, but it’s going to be fun finding out.