The Sharing of Dice | Gnome Stew – The Game Mastering Blog.

There’s a nice article over on Gnome Stew about sharing dice.

The only system I feel it’s acceptable to touch and use another man’s (or woman’s) dice is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition.

These dice are custom and the cost of getting your own set can be quite high, £7 – £10 for a set of 12 dice but multiple sets may be required unless you’re happy to re-roll a few times. A set of simple role play dice (d20, d12, d10, d%, d8, d6, d4) over on The Dice Shop website run to about £4.00 and contains the dice you need (again you may need to re-re-roll for damage).

But is the cost the main part of why its acceptable to use the centralised dice pool?  In my mind… no.

The main excitement of Warhammer Fantasy for our group is watching the dice pool being built.  Add a number of blue dice for characteristics,  swap some out for red reckless dice, add a couple of white fortune and black mis-fortune dice.

Pulling the dice out of the massive pile in the middle of the table and adding them to the ever increasing number of dice in your hand just adds that little bit of showmanship.  The “Ooohs!” and “Aaahs!” from the group as you use ALL your fortune points to add extra fortune dice to that all important roll is what makes the WFRP system such a wonderful story telling device.

So, if we’re playing WFRP you can feel the love, otherwise keep your hands off my dice….

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  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.

While preping for my new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay session I knocked up a quick encounter sheet for the GM.

This sheet helps me keep track of everything in the encounter.  For henchmen I just use a slash (\) between the wounds at the toughness intervals to monitor when a bad guy goes pop.

I will put up an example of a sheet that I used when I get the chance.   Hope this helps WFRP GM’s everywhere…

WFRP Encounter Tracker with ACE

***UPDATE***

Thanks to Chef we have found there may be a issue with the encounter sheet spreading over to two pages in word.  If you are having an issue with the format download this updated version provided by Chef.

Updated-WFRP-Encounter-Tracker-with-ACE

I would also like any feedback on the sheet and any suggestions for futher aids for WFRP.  Please leave your comments below…

OK, I honestly don’t know where to start with this one…

…no really, I have no idea.   You know those session where things dont go as planned, well we had one of those last night.  The session was a mixture of Monty Python with a sprinkle of Carry on Fantasy Roleplay and that’s probably as best as I can put it.

For the sake of this post I will try and write the session report as best as I can but I will put in a few examples of where the adventure took a turn for the chaotic.  Seriously anybody else in my group want to write this one?…

…Please?…

…No…

…Bugger…

Session Report

Last nights session was Kev’s second time behind the GM screen and we all knew we were in for an interesting night of Roleplay.  Kev’s style of GMing reminds me of a Lord of Rings extended DVD marathon.  It seems to go on and on, fighting against overwhelming odds until the last disc.  All hope has gone, your alone on both knees looking up to the sky praying for a small miracle, then Gollum rides you around like a jockey and bites your finger off.

We were playing a scouting party of four adventures.  As the adventure started we found ourselves running through a Beastman infested woods, if I’m completely honest the first thing we did was to stop running.  This was due to the fact we were not actively trying to get ourselves get killed.

As we slowly moved through the woods Nicky, playing an Elf, noticed fresh Beastmen tracks on the trail.

Using his exceptional Elf nature skills he tracked where the Beastmen were heading.  It turns out they were to the left, right and straight ahead.  Oh Bugger!  We were surrounded already and we hadn’t done anything.

With that an Owl hooted.  Nicky, wanting to try out his exceptional shooting skill, notched an arrow and took aim.  Suddenly it was night time.  Taken by the surprise sudden arrival of night the Elf missed his shot and startled the Owl. It flapped away into the distance hooting loudly.  Then the Beastmen were spotted through the trees.  It was a party of five Beastmen all chowing down to a fresh feast of raw meat.

The Elf took aim and let loose with his arrow.  The sharp point of the arrow penetrated the eye socket of a Beastman and buried deep into his skull.  This surprised the Beastman slightly and he started to wondered where the arrow, now pointing out of his face, had appeared from.

We all decided to pile into melee combat with the Beastmen and they were soon dispatched.  Yeah! Mark up one for the good guys.  So on to the fort!…

What fort I hear you ask?

Apparently the fort was where the secret trail starts.  We had gotten this information from the last village we visited.  As a “secret trail” it kind of sucked.  Not so much of a secret trail, more of a local landmark or local make out location.

On to the fort then!  Arriving at the fort we found the portcullis was down and locked.  The mechanism for raising it was on the other side of the forts circular protective wall.  The Elf bounded up the wall and then dropped / fell / flipped ass over tit and landed on the other side of the wall.  The group were all impressed and gave a slow round of applause from the other side of the portcullis.

Giving us the finger the Elf allowed us entry into the courtyard.

Tristan’s Pit fighter who had been injured in the last fight looked to see if anyone could help him with healing, but due to everyone in the party having intelligence of 2 he decided the best action was to go to sleep right then and there.

At this time it did not surprised me to be honest and we headed towards the entrance doorway.  We talked about dragging the Pit fighter but in the end we could not be assed and left the snoozing mound of muscle to the advancing Beastmen.

Opening the door into the dark fort we were presented with a dark corridor disappearing into the distance with doors located on the left and right.  I opened the door on the right and found piles of rusting metal that used to be an armoury being guarded by a couple of skeletons.  I closed the door and waited to see what the others would do.

Steve, playing a dwarf opened the door on the left.  Inside was total chaos, the most horrible creature known to man.  A small Beastman singing a melody of Michael Jackson hits (straight from the GM’s mouth, but I think he had gotten too excitable due to somebody’s influence).  I think we gave up.  Steve hit the Beastman with his Axe and Nicky shot it with an arrow.  Personally I would have just looked for the mute button but I had checked out.

Moving down the corridor we came to the last door.  I checked back in, opened the door, Chaos Warrior, and checked right back out again.  Fuck it, I thought, my Watchman has a bonus to Charm and I’m going to use it!  A SUCCESS!  Are you F’ing kidding me!  I looked the Chaos Warrior straight in the eye and asked him if he had ever thought about Jesus and would he like a copy of the Watchtower.

This put the Warrior on the back foot and I was about to push forward my advantage when the Elf suggested the Chaos Warrior took me on in a Roshambo competition.  It was also put forward that he was allowed to go first.  Nicky then went on to show me the pointy bits on the Warriors amour and how I was about to die.

What happened next was a battle won by sheer determination.  The Pit fighter woke up and headed in to give us a hand.  It’s lucky that when you hit with an attack you will always get one wound on the target.  Without it we would have been dead.  Oh Yeah!

Chaos Warrior dispatched, Check.

Found the secret passageway under the fort, Check.

Were 30 Beastmen camping in the passageway? Check.

Were they all stood around a chest of gun powder, Check.

The Elf went first in the initiative order and decided to shoot me in the back.  This came as quite a pleasant surprise and as I was driven over by the arrow blow (STABBING ME IN THE BACK YOU LITTLE ELF BASTARD!) he ran up over my back, grabbed the torch I was carrying and threw it at the gun powder.

Not to be outdone I grabbed the Elf’s foot on the way over and guided him into the fire pit nearby.  By the time we had sorted out this turn of events the Dwarf had killed the Pit fighter and it was a case of PvP.

The Beastmen did not even get a look in.  Corruption effects were going off all over the place and in the end we put the session out of our misery…sigh.

Now, to be honest I don’t think this session was Kev’s fault.  If you asked the guys they will probably point at me and say I was a bad influence on just about everyone at the table including Kev.   OK, remove the probably from that last sentence.

But do you know what?  The session events were actually fun.  Yes the Roleplay suffered but sometimes it’s nice to just sit and have fun with your mates and boy did we have a laugh, it was brilliant fun.

On another note I want to say what a brilliant system the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition has turned out to be.  It’s fun and easy to learn and lets you tell the story.  It also doesn’t just reduce the Roleplay to a bunch of mechanics.

Well done FFG!

Holy Balls, have any of you tried to get extra sets of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay dice recently? Its not easy!

I’m trying to get back into Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I purchased the three new books and I thought I would pick up some extra dice for my group.

Honestly, it would be easier to come up with a plausible reason to watch Hollyoaks than find these dice sets. Granted you can get 12 in the new Game Master Vault but at £20+ for 12 dice is not easy to justify, especially as I wanted 3 sets.

I know there’s the WFRP toolkit for the iPhone and iPod but I just love the feel of physical dice.

Oh well back to the hunt…