4 Missing Conditions

Warhammer 3rd puts just about everything on a card. This is mostly great, because it means less time spent looking things up in a rulebook. Condition cards, in particular, are really useful because they serve as reminders to the players about various weird effects the PCs are suffering from. Not only do you not have to look things up, but you're also less likely to forget to apply that penalty to your die rolls. It's right there! How can you forget it?

Well, that only works if they actually make a Condition card for things that logically should be a condition. Here's 4 and a half Condition cards I made for my table because I felt their absence was troubling.

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Darkness
Warhammer has specific rules for actions taken in darkness. Such actions get a whole bunch of black penalty dice added to them. This should totally have been put on a card in the core set, so I made one:

To the left is my first draft, which faithfully summarizes the official rules.

To the right you'll find my revised version. I swapped out two of the misfortune dice for one purple die in cases where there's literally no light. It better matches the penalty from the Blinded condition, and also provides for an increased chance of rolling Chaos Stars, which is the symbol that generates all the hilarious fall-off-the-side-of-the-location-card effects scattered throughout various Warhammer encounters.

For the record, I totally would have started the purple dice much earlier on that list if not for the existence of the Dwarven and Elven racial ability. The night vision possessed by those two character races cancels two black dice from darkness penalties, but has no impact on purple dice. If not for that, every instance of two black on that card would be replaced with a purple.

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Prone

There's a few points where the rules discuss what it means to be knocked prone. Standing up from being knocked prone officially costs a manoeuvre. Elsewhere in the rules they suggest you might apply fortune or misfortune dice to rolls involving prone individuals, but leave the specifics up to the GM.

As flexible and vague as that is, is it would be rather helpful to have at least the minimum effects put on a Condition card for easy reference. So I made exactly that.

I included a specific statement that you can't change locations while prone. That seemed the most elegant way to restrict crawling, which officially has no rules. Per the books only common sense stops you from running while prone.

EDIT: As has been pointed out by comments here and at the Warhammer forums, I really should revise this to add a misfortune die to ranged attacks from long and extreme range. It only makes sense.

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Fire

After much searching the books, I could only conclude that Warhammer 3rd doesn't actually have any official fire rules.  There are, however, a number of location cards for things like burning buildings, barges and cities.  Each time an adventure needed to take place inside or adjacent to a fire, they made a card to capture the feel of it. They aren't quite uniform, but they have a few commonalities. They usually slowly load you up on Fatigue points, sometimes give you minor penalties on your actions,  and if you roll Chaos Stars near a fire it may well result in actual wounds.

The upshot of this is that I could reverse-engineer some baseline effects for standing in or near a major fire. Since I have a Bright Wizard pyromancer in my gaming group, this seemed worth putting on a generic reference card.

EDIT: I neglected to mention the real point of this card. It's not really intended to be applied as a condition directly to a target. Mainly it's a cheat-sheet that summarizes the most common effects of all the various fire-related location cards. That's why instead of "Dependent Effect" it says "Likely Affects Of A Burning Environment". I don't generally let my players thumb through my binder of unused location cards during the game, but I wanted our Bright Wizard to be able to eyeball the strategic benefits of setting a building on fire.

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Non-Lethal Damage

Warhammer 3rd has no official rules for pulling your punches or dealing non-lethal damage. A number of GMs have attempted to address this specifically with custom actions or house-rules that inflict fatigue points instead of wounds. This runs into problems, though, as Fatigue and Wounds are mechanically very different.  PCs are generally KO'd much faster by fatigue than wounds, and per the default rules NPCs don't take fatigue.


My version of the card is a voluntary effect. The main effect is that it cancels your critical hits on any attack that gets no Chaos Stars.

As it turns out, the normal healing rules are very generous, so once the fight is over normal wounds feel like non-lethal damage.  Critical wounds take longer to heal, and are also what determines whether or not a KO'd character actually dies.  As long as you take zero crits, you can technically survive an infinite number of normal wounds.

I kept the side-effects of the card pretty minimal, so it'd be worth using when the situation warrants. It adds a misfortune die and reduces damage by 1, just to pay lip service to the notion that you're intentionally not giving it your all.

Sensible and Comparatively-Elegant Healing Rules

Update: It has come to my attention that there is an official errata to the broken healing rules in the game. These errata are not in the official online FAQ and Errata Document. They are, instead in the Player's Guide reprint.  So my rules below are essentially wasted effort. The official errata is that healing cannot be spammed; Each healing action can only be applied to each character once per day. So the seemingly-broken Soothing Touch blessing that looked to be unlimited free healing is actually not broken at all, and you can't actually apply First Aid rolls in scene after scene.

For those interested, the errata is on page 89 of the Player's Guide.

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As mentioned in yesterday's post, the healing rules for Warhammer 3rd are certainly the most confusing and ill-considered set of rules in the game. The mechanics as written are very exploitable and easily abused. They basically amount to "players can have unlimited healing, but require dozens of rolls to do it."  Unlimited healing undermines the "grim and perilous" elements of the setting. Even if you're going for a high-powered cinematic game where rapid healing would be okay, the average amount of healing (just over 1 point at Rank 1) per die roll makes for a lot of tedium. Repetitive low-tension die rolls between each fight does not sound like fun to me.

I don't necessarily want to throw those rules out entirely as all sorts of character abilities reference them, but I certainly want to pare down the clunkiness, and shore up any loopholes or weak spots that might undermine the grittiness of the setting. I would like the lion's share of healing to be accomplished by the passage of in-character time, not via spamming actions. I also really want the rules to be easy to understand. I don't mind having to look them up from time to time, as long as they're easy to read off of a chart or summary.

Towards that end I've worked out some rules that are far more sensible, and elegant (at least in comparison to the original rules). They may possibly still be more fiddly than I want them to be, but Warhammer is definitely several levels crunchier than most games I run. I figure we'll give them a try for a few sessions, and figure out if they need further tweaking once we've how well they work. 

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Summary of Revised Healing Rules:

• Heal Toughness in Wounds per full night's rest.
• One Resilience check per full night's rest to recover additional wounds, or recover from crits or diseases.
• Long-Term Care uses the exact same rules as natural healing, and simply gets bonus dice.
• Limit one critical wound or disease symptom healed per day by non-magical means.
• First Aid and Immediate Care no longer takes a die roll, and cannot be spammed.
• Magical healing cannot be spammed.

Full details follow, along with sidebar observations about what these changes accomplish.

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Natural Healing and Long-Term Care

Resting over night recovers a number of normal Wounds equal to your Toughness.

In addition, it allows for one Resilience (Toughness) check.  The dice pool for that check is modified as follows:

• +1 Fortune Die:  For being tended to by a healer, doctor, friend or servant, regardless of skill. This is the base reward for someone other than yourself taking care of you.
• +X additional Fortune Dice: Where X equals the number of Ranks that healer (etc) has in First Aid.
• +Y Expertise Dice: Where Y equals the number of Ranks that healer (etc) has in Medicine.
• +1 Challenge Die: The basic difficulty these checks will usually have.
• +1 more Challenge Die: If you have any Critical Wounds or are suffering from a Disease.
• -1 Challenge Die: If your healer (etc) has Medicine trained, the overall difficulty is reduced by 1 die.

Those dice are rolled with on the following results chart:

• Success: You may convert 1 critical wound into a normal wound, or overcome one symptom of a disease.  The crate or symptom in question must have a severity equal to or less than the total number of successes rolled.
• Boon: Heal an additional number of wounds equal to the number of Boons rolled.

In addition, if the healer has Medicine Trained, you may choose to instead count any number of Successes as Boons instead before resolving the effects. So a roll of 2 successes and 3 boons can instead be resolved as if it were a roll of 0 successes and 5 boons, or 1 success and 4 boons.

What this has accomplished: The number of die rolls has greatly been reduced, while total healing has only been minimally reduced. Confusing and redundant instructions have been removed, especially in regards to long-term care, which doesn't really have special rules at all in this version. Medicine rank is one of the strongest factors in long-term wound recovery, whereas before there was only minimal difference between having a Rank 1 or Rank 3 expert in Medicine. Disease recovery has been integrated into wound recovery, so being critically injured and diseased at the same time is more dangerous (as it logically should be). Without magical healing, characters will only be able to heal either 1 critical wound or 1 disease per day. 

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Immediate Care:

At the end of every fight, it is assumed the PCs bandage up their wounds and conduct whatever other first aid is necessary. They may all immediately recover X normal wounds, where X equals the lesser of:

• the highest number of First Aid ranks any PC or friendly NPC has, or
• the total wounds they suffered in that fight.

This effect cannot be stacked or spammed, it represents the total amount of assistance First Aid can provide on the spot. Care provided after the effect is relegated to the natural healing roll at the start of the next day.

In addition, anyone who has First Aid trained may tend to 1 patient per Rally step. That patient recovers X normal wounds, as above.

The action "Splints & Bandages" is an exception to the above rules, as it is already kept in check by the restriction (printed on the action card) of not recharging till the encounter is over.

What this has accomplished: The frequency of First Aid checks has been strictly limited, and the number of die rolls significantly reduced. There's no longer any question of whether or not you can spam heal. Healing rates are no longer near-infinite, and maximizing your healing doesn't put the rest of the table to sleep. As a side note, actually training First Aid has a bit more value than it did in the original rules.

Splints & Bandages is no longer a redundant action, it is now a powerful option for the dedicated healer. You can use it back-to-back (once during the fight, and a second time when the fight is over) but the opportunity cost to do so is pretty high: you'd be losing one round's attack during this fight, as well as your ability to use this action it at all during your next encounter

Caveat: These revised Immediate Care rules have greatly reduced the amount of healing the PCs have at their disposal. I believe this is a good thing for the game, as the Warhammer setting is supposed to be very gritty and a bit "low fantasy" compared to the average D&D world. These revised rules have not yet seen extensive playtesting, so I do not yet know for certain if I trimmed things back to the correct and intended levels. It's possible I may have been too aggressive, and may have to revise later to some degree of compromise. We'll see how it goes, and I'll report back if anything starts to prove problematic.

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Magical Healing:

Each individual form of magical healing may only successfully treat any given person once in any single day.

This means that if you drink a Healing Draught and it rolls all blanks, you may choose to drink another one later. You can repeat this as many times as you want until you roll at least 1 success.

For spells and blessings, only the first instance of healing is allowed. Many such actions feature healing as more of a side-effect than the main point of the spell, so there's nothing to stop you from casting them repeatedly. Once a given spell has healed you however, the healing portion (and only the healing portion) of future castings the same day is ignored.  In the event where no one at the table can remember whether or not a given source has healed a player already, we'll assume it hasn't. Also, if a spell has more than 1 healing line in it's results, the total healing generated from one casting is allowed. We aren't trying to shut down healing entirely, just prevent abuse stemming from repeatable free healing spells.

The same thing applies to spells or blessings that cure diseases or heal/convert critical wounds. The first disease or crit recovered is all that any given target gets from that spell per day.

What this has accomplished: Various loopholes and spammable exploits have been sealed off. A side effect of this is that there is now more reason for any given caster to take more than 1 action that can heal. As a result, high-level healers will actually be functionally better at healing the injured than starting characters.

With the overall reduced healing options,  Healing Draughts are actually worth picking up. Instead of being an expensive and redundant option of little value, they are now a way to accelerate your daily ability to heal.

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Fatigue & Stress

Just a clarification. The various limits applied to Wound recovery in no way imply any limit to Fatigue or Stress mitigation. Fatigue and Stress are intended to constantly adjust up and down within and between scenes. Many healing spells can eliminate Fatigue or Stress, and so could be used repeatedly to do so even if that same spell had already healed wounds on the same target.

Per the rules, at the end of any major Encounter (and again at the end of a full night's rest) every PC recovers Fatigue equal to their Toughness and Stress equal to their Willpower. The new limits on healing do not interfere with that in any way.

Everhammer Revisited

I ran some "Everhammer" (Everway, using select mechanics ported over from Warhammer FRP 3rd Ed) over Thanksgiving while visiting friends in Portland, OR.  This time we got in 12 to 13 hours of actual play, split in two sessions. This slightly more than doubled the total amount of Everhammer I've run.

Overall, it went really smashingly well.

Plotline: 
The session was mostly creepy, with a little bit of humor, and a heavy layer of impending doom. Apparently, I was doing something right, because the players kept deciding to put distance between themselves and the various creepy NPCs I'd made. (As I compose this, I'm reminded of a review I once read for the movie Lost Highway where the review put himself on a strict budget of no more than 10 uses of the word "creepy" in one review. I think I'll do the same.)

We picked up from last time with the PCs having just come through a gateway into an unidentified Realm. They knew that there was a pretty major villain (quite probably Alurax the dragon) just a few days behind them, so they didn't really want to stay near the gate. The nearest civilization was a huge barn or stable up on a ridge a few hours hike from their current position. As they approached, they had some encounters with ghosts, which revealed there were some real "wicked witch" types living at those stables. The witches were sort of Norn like, seers and prophetesses who delighted in giving out terrible omens, and sometimes chose to swindle and murder their potential clients.

So the PCs decided to sneak away from the creepy witches. From the high vantage point of the cliffs, they could see a small village not too far away, and what looked like a large military camp a few hours beyond it.

They head to the village, but find the locals paranoid, conservative, creepy and a little insane. These people are in to a little S&M apparently, and punish the smallest crimes with mutilation, piercing, and huge heavy chains. So the PCs slink away from the creepy rural locals, and head towards the military camp, which the rurals had referred to as the big city.

The big city turns out to be even more fundamentalist and creepy than the little village was, so the PCs decide to high-tail it back to the Witches, and see if they get the evil prophetesses to point them in the direction of the nearest gate away that doesn't have a ferocious dragon beyond it.

At this point, speaking as sadistic and awful GM, I was feeling pretty good. I'd made the PCs so stressed and nervous they'd fled a dragon to the witches, fled the witches (and ghosts) to a village, fled the village to a city, and fled the city back to the witches. It warmed my cold dark GM's heart. So, of course, after a creepy (and just plain wrong) couple of scenes interacting with the Witches, it seemed only appropriate to have them relate that the only other gate out of the realm was back in the creepy city.

Back to the city it is. There was a bit of a run-in with the TSA equivalents amidst the city watch. That didn't go so well, and the PCs ended up in a running battle all the way into the middle of town. After some pretty nasty fighting, they managed to get to the gate. Around the gate (on this side) the creepy repressive chain-wearing punishment-mongers had built The Museum of Human Suffering, so that anyone entering the gate from another world would immediately know that this place doesn't tolerate dissent.

On the other side of the gate, in whatever world it links to, was a cage and a watchdog. Basically, the folks there didn't want the creepy sadistic folks from the Suffering museum to invade/expand/visit, so they'd set up some barriers to stop it.

The PCs managed to finagle their way out of the cage around the gate, and we decided to leave off there. The storyline will resume the next time a 3-day weekend takes me and my wife down to Portland again.

Anyone looking to learn more about the witches should read my page on Crone Crater.
Anyone looking to learn more about the chain-covered folks should read my page on Restriction.
I can't fill in any more details in this post, because I've already used my allotted budget of "creepy".


Mechanics:
Everhammer is basically the general character creation rules from Everway, with the dice from Warhammer 3rd added in. I blogged about it once a few months ago. Full write-up here.

To give you a feel for it, if a character with Fire 4, an Archery specialization, and a 0-point power called "Improbable Ricochet" (this is actually one of the PCs) were to fire in a bizarre bouncing arc at a villain with Fire 5 and no relevant defensive powers (which was one of her main targets during the battle in the city), the die pool would be 4 Blue, 1 Yellow, and 1 White vs 1 Purple and 4 Black dice.  That's a 58% chance of scoring a Wound, and a 53% chance of scoring one or more Boons. In the process, she has a 22% chance of taking a Fatigue for her efforts. I'm pleased with it. It's simple and intuitive, easy to improvise, and the math works well enough.

Fatigue flows pretty fast, but between my tweak that it only takes 1 Boon to remove a fatigue, and my port of the "Assess the Situation" action, it's pretty easy for PCs to manage it. There were high and low crests and troughs to the fatigue levels, which provided dramatic tension as needed, but in actuality, only one roll ever ended up penalized by pre-existing fatigue levels. It was just enough to keep the players wary, but never lead to a doom spiral. Success, if you ask me.

It was quick and easy to pick up, as well. My rules document is 2 pages long. I reread it just before we left to take the train down to Portland, and only had to reference it twice in 13 hours of play. The players needed about 5 minutes to look over their character sheets again, and be walked through one sample die roll, and then everybody was ready to go. Success again, all around.

The players had no complaints. I, however, found three rough edges I need to smooth over, two of which stemmed from the fact that I didn't do any prep work.

• Everway NPCs are all about their weird powers. As GM, next time I need to spend a few minutes pre-game writing up weird powers. I had to improvise them as the game rolled on, and that wasn't always the best. However, the guy who could pierce your nose from a distance was pretty neat, mainly because it came up during combat.
• Same thing about Boon & Bane effects. I could have used some terrain cards appropriate to the places my fight scenes were happening at, and some prepared effects for high Boon or Bane rolls or for the Comets and Chaos Stars. These dice symbols and effects are all really detailed and defined in default Warhammer FRP, and improvising them off the cuff was a little uneven. Sometimes I was on fire, other times I froze up.
• Exactly how many Wounds or Fatigue does it take to knock out a PC? According to my 2-page rules summary, it takes Wounds = Earth +1. That rules summary doesn't mention how much Fatigue it takes to make a character pass out, but my original post here about the system says the answer for Fatigue is 10. One of my players had it written on her character sheet KO=8. That character's Earth score is 3. Somewhere, numerical wires got crossed several months ago. I can straighten it out easily enough, but it was annoying to discover the disparity (and lack of answer on my rules sheet) mid-session.

Having identified those three areas, I'll be ready with fixes for next time. Memo to my future self: do your prep work. It's a rules-light game, but will run much better if you're properly prepared.

Definitely looking forward with great anticipation to our next session in Portland.