After my previous GMing of Deathwatch went so well (i.e. we stopped at session 5) I thought I’d have a go at running another system. The first question then is why WFRP3?

  Well, we had been playing this a year or so back and I was very much enjoying it, but had a bunch of ideas of what I’d do if I was GM. Since then, I’ve had GMing experience (the aforementioned Deathwatch), I got the Core Set as a birthday present and we just finished another game. So the time was right for me to try and GM again, hopefully lasting a bit longer this time [that's what she said-Ed].

  I had recently been listening to the excellent Reckless Dice podcast, and they have a couple of features on character creation. One of the things they said, which I took to heart, is that the random character creation tends to make for better games than letting people choose. So I decided that I would enforce the random character creation for my game. Rolling the 4 fortune dice for each player we ended up with 3 dwarves and 2 humans.

  Then I gave them the three careers and let them choose one. What interested me here is that most of the players went for the most combat oriented character of the selected careers. This leads me on to a very important question. Why did the majority select combat careers? I think there are two possible answers:

1. They enjoy the combat aspect of RPGs more than the other roleplaying aspects

2. They don’t realise there is more to the system than combat (i.e. they are expecting it to be like D&D4)

  The answer to this question will then guide what scenarios I devise for them. If the answer is 1, then I need to add more combat encounters because that is what they enjoy. If the answer is 2, maybe I should be making sure there are a wider range of social/investigative encounters to show the players what the system can do? I realise that these are not mutually exclusive. Even if they like combat and want to do it as much as possible , that doesn’t preclude having any social encounters or investigation. But it does mean I need to tailor scenarios so that things end up in combat more often than not (e.g there doesn’t appear to be a lot of combat in the Eye for an Eye scenario, so I would have to engineer ways of adding more combat).

  Back to the characters. I was fortunate in having the Drunken Goblin himself as part of the group, since he has GM’d this game a couple of times (including our groups previous game) and had bought his copy of the players guide. This meant I could leave him to sort out the dwarf players, whilst I helped the two human character players. This all went without difficulty, and it was only when characters started spending money that I was needed to make judgements on rarity and encumbrance.

  We finished character creation with about an hour of our session to spare, which meant we had time to do a quick encounter, just so everyone could refresh themselves as to how the rules work, and get a handle on their characters and play style. Because I had no idea what kind of group we would end up with, I didn’t have a scenario planned that I could start them out on. So, I went with the classic, characters are in a tavern and an Orc breaks down the door. This worked fairly well, as it let me see how creatures are run and it gives me a choice as to how I start the next session. I can either start it at this same tavern, have it take place somewhere else a few days later, or ignore it entirely.

  The last thing I did was ask for 3 things that could be used as character hooks within the story: 

a) Something the rest of the party knows about them

b) Something no-one else in the party knows

c) Which God they worship

  At time of writing I haven’t had any responses.

  There are two things I will take from this session going forward:

1. Get the players to explain how they build up their dice pools, since I couldn’t be certain they were taking all factors into account. This is especially critical with Mike, since he was using the iPod app so I couldn’t even see which dice he was adding.

2. Re-read the A/C/E rules, since I’m pretty sure I implemented them incorrectly.

Written by Chefsim

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