This weekend I (almost) got the chance to experience the new Warhammer RPG. Unfortunately, the person who volunteered (I assume) to demo the game arrived 45 minutes late and didn't really understand or even like the game in the first place. Imagine a diehard D&D 3.5 fan trying to demo 4e a week before it was available to the public. Kind of a disaster. And that's a shame, because that person's lack of preparation and even interest spoiled the experience for everyone there. Everyone complained that character creation was too complicated, but that's just because nobody knew how to make a character. Once I was able to get ahold of the rules, it was pretty simple. If I recall correctly, it went something like this:
Draw 3 Careers and choose 1.
Pick a race listed on that Career.
Note your 6 base stats and increase the ones listed on your Career.
Assign some of your points to buy up your stats.
Spend your remaining points buying Wealth, Skill Points, extra Action cards, and extra Talent cards.
Spend your Skill Points (at maximum, we're talking 4 skills and two specializations).
Choose extra Action cards (this might take a minute as you sift through the cards, basically like choosing powers or spells)
Choose extra Talent cards (again many options, but the Talents are simpler, so this should only take a minute)
Note standard equipment and buy more with the money you get from your Wealth.
Maybe make a few notes about your character and why he or she is an adventurer.
That's it. Not really complicated and pretty quick if you're familiar with it.
Of course the demo-er should have brought pre-gens, but he didn't. So we made characters and didn't actually play. Still, the rules looked decent and had some clever bits. I'll cover some highlights in a moment, but first, the price. $99.95. Holy crap! But consider that you're getting like three paperback rulebooks, a box to store them in, high quality cardboard standees with plastic bases, a butt-load of little tokens, and a variety of cards and character sheets and custom dice. The price might still be a little steep, especially all at once, but it's not quite ridiculous if you think about it.
So, the dice. You roll blue "Characteristic" dice to accomplish a task. If it's difficult, or opposed, you roll a number of purple, success-cancelling "Challenge" dice. If there are extenuating circumstances, good or bad, you get white or black "Boon" and "Bane" dice. There are also red or green "Stance" dice which replace your normal Characteristic dice if you're being particularly careful or reckless. Then you roll the dice and count up the hammer shapes, minus the crossed-sword shapes. If you've got any hammers left, you succeed. However, the bane and boon dice might influence secondary aspects of your attempt, regardless of your success or failure. If you roll a bunch of skull shapes, you might suffer from fatigue. If you roll a bunch of bird-shapes, maybe you'll get a bonus on your next attack.
And that's mostly how you get things done. Now, one of the clever bits is the whole conservative/reckless thing. If you approach a task conservatively, you're more likely to succeed (it seems), but theres a chance that you can "take too long" and suffer complications from that. If you act recklessly, you're more likely to get an exceptional result, but there also a chance that you might exhaust yourself.
Another neat bit is the abstracted combat area. Instead of counting squares or something, all characters are a relative distance from one another, either Engaged, Close, Far or Extreme (or something like that). You use tokens between the two characters to show how far apart they are from each other or any landmarks in the encounter. Clever.
The other bit is the "party" cards. This is a little card with a tracker that tracks the intra-party stress. If your characters are constantly bickering for more than a few seconds at a time, the meter on the card slowly rises, and the party suffers a minor consequence to represent the turmoil in the party. However, the party card does offer a positive side-effect, so it's not all about the suffering. A couple of the choices are "mercenaries-for-hire" and "gang of theives". Some people I talked to really didn't like this, usually for no good reason.
Anyway, this looks like a pretty good game with some nice innovations. It's kind of like "Warhammer 4e" at least as far as the design foucs runs (and people's violent reaction to it). It is unfortunate that it's $99, and I think they could have easily transferred some of the cards and counters and other fiddly bits that jack up the price to tracks on the character sheet or or paper handouts or even just stuff to copy to the character sheet (like you might do with a 4e power). Fantasy Flight makes board games, however, so I'm not surprised that they went with their strengths in presentation. Besides, Games Workshop properties have always been for the gamer with more money than sense. :)
Anybody else have an opinion on this stuff?