WFRP 4th Edition Review Part 4 – Core Rules

Having gotten the basic principles of how your character is built (Careers) and how you better your character (Skills and Advancement), we now dig into the core mechanic behind WFRP 4th Edition…

Basic Principles

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has always (almost; I’m ignoring 3rd edition) used possibly the most straight forward system you could find – D100. It was easy to learn, and lacked any major complexity that can sometimes curse other systems. D100 required you to roll two D10s to determine a number between 1 and 100. Your characteristic told you beforehand what you needed (equal or under) in order to pass any given test. Everything followed this principle (except magic, but that’s another article). That was it. Pass or Fail. Black and White. Which was nice and simple, and a great way to get into roleplaying because it wasn’t daunting, and did not require any further thought. You knew what you wanted to do, your characteristic told you want you needed on the dice roll, and it was obvious if you had passed or not.

The only modifiers to worry about were the ones applied by your skills (or lack of), which were in easily manageable steps of +/-10. The GM could indicate if a task was Easy, Average, or Hard, and applied the modifier to your characteristic before you rolled your dice. In 1st Edition, there was no official mechanic to determine how well you succeeded, or how badly you failed. It was Do or Do Not, to borrow shamelessly from another franchise. Second Edition introduced the Degrees of Success mechanic, where every full 10 you passed your check by indicated a greater level of success, and this could be applied in the negative for Degrees of Failure. This went some way to ease the absolute pass/fail feeling you could get from the system.

Since 4th Edition continues the tradition of using D100 as its core mechanic, you might believe that the same limitations will apply, and in some cases they do. But Cubicle 7 have managed to come up with some clever ideas to loosen the shackles.

Simple Tests

Simple tests are the familiar pass/fail mechanic, you declare your action, determine which skill you need to use to accomplish your goal, which in turn tells you your characteristic – the GM tells you how difficult the task is. Difficulty ranges from Very Hard (-30), though Hard (-20), Difficult (-10), Challenging (no modifier), up to Average (+20), Easy (+40) and Very Easy (+60), which are some big modifiers, larger than any in prior editions. With the difficulty set, you take your ranks in the Skill you need, add it to the Characteristic tied to that skill and you now have the target number. Roll your 2d10s, and BAM! You have passed. Or failed. This (all too familiar) type of test is only used when the only concern is if you succeed or not. For the more complex tasks where the gravity of your failure, or the magnitude of your triumph are important, you use Dramatic Tests.

Dramatic Tests

Dramatic tests introduce the first significant new mechanic – Success Levels. Very similar to 2nd Edition’s Degrees of Success, the two can be easily confused. While a Degree of Success was every full 10 points below your target number on your dice roll, a Success Level (SL) is the difference between the results on your tens dice, and the tens number of the minimum you require to pass the check.

To illustrate: Let’s say your target is 63 (Characteristic + Skill +/- Difficulty). You roll the dice and get a 54. That’s a pass. And in a simple test that’s all you need to know, but in a Dramatic Test, you compare the 5 on the tens dice, and the 6 from your target. That’s a difference of 1, so One Success Level. (However, in 2nd Edition, it’s only a difference of 9, not a full 10 below, so it wouldn’t get you anything extra).

This mechanic is really important in 4th Edition, which I will come to in a later article: for now its sufficient to understand how it works. It may feel a bit confusing, especially for players who might be ingrained in the older editions, but it is a small change that won’t take long to adjust to. How it applies to Dramatic Tests is the important thing here. The number of success levels can indicate if your result was marginal or outstanding, or conversely if you failed by a whisker or totally screwed things up and potentially made your situation worse.

Opposed Tests

Continuing to build on the Success Level system, Opposed Tests are not a new idea to WFRP. Indeed I am sure every GM has done something similar in the earlier editions by simply comparing how much they passed a test by, compared to the character on the other side.

In 4th Edition, it all comes down to Success Levels and how many you have over your opponent. It’s not a new concept, just presented in a new way, but what the Success Level system can implement is on the occasions when both parties fail their rolls, you can determine how many negative Success Levels (Failure Levels?) each side has, and whoever has fewer (closer to success) comes out on top. Of course, you need to take into account that both parties have still failed at what they were doing, so care would need to be taken to see if it works in any particular situation.

Extended Test

Finally, we do have one more type of check that also relies on the Success Level mechanic. As its name suggests, the Extended Check is not an immediate pass/fail result, it takes more than a single round to determine the outcome. The example the book uses is that of a miscreant trying to pick a lock before a guard discovers them. In this case, the GM has to determine a set number of SLs the player needs before they successfully pick the lock, and the player must make multiple Pick Lock skill checks over a number of rounds in an attempt to accumulate enough SLs to succeed.

Of course, with every round the guard gets closer, and every negative SL takes one away from the players accumulated total, so in time-critical checks the tension can really ramp up as you get close to your target SLs, and then suffer a few really bad rolls that puts your progress right back.

A few other details

You can now assist in checks, with each assisting character adding +10 to the tests target, there are a few rules involved here but nothing that really needs to be mentioned here.

Automatic success (rolls of 01-05) and Automatic failure (rolls of 96-100) return, meaning you can still fail a test even if your post-modified target number exceeds 100.

Speaking of stats exceeding 100, that’s covered too: for every full 10 your final characteristic exceeds 100, you gain +1 SL if you succeed. However, in these cases, you only have a 4% chance of failure. This is not something that could happen in earlier editions because the advances available to your characteristics, combined with a perfect starting score, meant you wouldn’t be able to get a characteristic over 70. Overall, I can see this becoming a problem, but possibly not until you are getting into the end-game levels of your characters given how advances work and how much they cost. All told, if you are more into the narrative, and less into rules, I think the Extended tests can really add to the tension of story of a check, and the success levels go someway to break out of the binary nature inherent with the mechanic.