I saw this:

"The combat system for WFRP Fourth Edition has its roots in earlier editions of the game, but we've made significant changes. The design goals were to speed up fights and eliminate boring stalemates arising from repeated attack roll failure."

http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?5288-Warhammer-Fantasy-Roleplay-Combat-Preview

Is this really a thing? I mean, truly?

I've GM'd and played in both WHFRP and WH40KRP (Only War's my big one). Combat isn't slow: you need to know what you're going to do and memorize/scribble down the calc (which will become rote once you do it a couple times). It's as simple as that.

Hell, if you need to, just scribble down on a post-it note the common stuff plus stuff that your weapons can do like what Storm does compared to Twin-Linked. Then roll the dice or auto-roll via an app. Done.

That's something I increasingly demand of players from a very early stage (sometimes as early as their second sesh, regardless of system we're using). And I have no problem shearing off narrative descriptions in order to smash through combat if it's gonna be A Thing(tm) or drilling it down to a roll or two if it's just foreplay. Most of my players have been really good about this sort of thing, made it pretty painless honestly.

What the hell are people doing here?

Well, compared to what?

Compared to the games I've been playing in the last ten years, yes, WHFRP's combat is slow.

Compared to many of the games I've been playing up to then? Nah.

I welcome the changes. I have the 1st and 2nd edition if I ever want to get back to that specific rules set, but WHFRP2 was the better system. If they can improve on that, I'm on board.

P.S.: I highly approve of the art direction and release products thus far.

This ties in with a perception I've been having about recent games.  The idea of a character generating defense feels like it has fallen out of favor entirely.  

What I mean is the idea that a character had a defense they could increase seems almost like a discarded idea.  The idea of having a sword skill or something similar that directly contributes to parrying is something I haven't seen in a while.

The idea of actually having a player ROLL for an active defense?  That seems completely taboo now.

It's been replaced by this idea of static defenses which are influenced by a tiny selection of feat-like add ons.  Sometimes it's not even that.  In some cases it's back to armor being the be all end all of defense like back in the AD&D days.

This is in contrast to ever increasing attack bonuses and percentages.  There's no shortage of ways to increase attack ability.  It's just defense that has fallen out of favor.

A lot of the time there's an inflated hit point system where combat is just a slog of whittling down huge hit point numbers.  It's like game designers have become so frightened of a "miss" and "swinginess" that they'll accept anything other than the idea of an attack roll without damage almost guaranteed.  Everyone has to be able to hit, even though the hit is so inconsequential that it's effectively meaningless.

I don't know.  Maybe it's a false perception.  I don't know if it's relevant here.  Since it's Warhammer, a game with a reputation for lethality, I'd hope not.

One's perceptions may be swayed by the reasons one plays the game.

My players like role-playing.  Even in combat, they enjoy playing out their characters' reactions and making choices the way their characters' would. Drawn out action rolls take away from this. (That's why our home brew uses a single opposed roll.) They still want to roll dice to decide things. They just don't want it getting into the way of the role playing.

On the other hand, other players may be more interested in tactics and strategizing their use of magic and terrain to increase bonuses. For them, our home brew combat is going to be boring and repetitive.

My solution to bad rolls where everyone misses, as I've mentioned in other threads, is to add role playing to the combat. I would make the enemy start talking to the players. Chances are, my Cave Catering crew, would end up selling food to the monsters.

Quote from: Tod13;1042917One's perceptions may be swayed by the reasons one plays the game.

My players like role-playing.  Even in combat, they enjoy playing out their characters' reactions and making choices the way their characters' would. Drawn out action rolls take away from this. (That's why our home brew uses a single opposed roll.) They still want to roll dice to decide things. They just don't want it getting into the way of the role playing.

On the other hand, other players may be more interested in tactics and strategizing their use of magic and terrain to increase bonuses. For them, our home brew combat is going to be boring and repetitive.

My solution to bad rolls where everyone misses, as I've mentioned in other threads, is to add role playing to the combat. I would make the enemy start talking to the players. Chances are, my Cave Catering crew, would end up selling food to the monsters.

It's not a roleplaying issue at all.  I don't have a problem with complex combat at all as long as I can interface with the system from an IC perspective.  If the combat is adding mechanics that line up with things my character would be thinking about or trying to do, then that's awesome.  It's when those mechanics become dissociated simply to provide tactical options, that you can count me out.  Rolemaster, Hackmaster, Harn - all good.

In the case of WFRP4, I think C7 is just listening to the "Common Wisdom" that WFRP1 was a whiff-fest and that simply failing without some dramatic narrative twist isn't fun.  Like much of gaming "common wisdom", it's complete revisionist horseshit.

If they spend too much time designing and tuning the combat based on player-facing meta-concerns and not enough based on character-facing choices, they're going to end up with a dissociated mess.

Whiffhammer Fantasy Roleplay is a thing. Not really an extremely annoying thing in 1e, as the game was very simple and when you hit, you hit!. It was more pronounced in 2e, but again not really annoyingly so.
C7's approach to fixing it seems to be to pile on modifiers to make you miss less. Which makes me a bit worried about the effects of a hit.

I've got my fingers crossed for WF4e. I've never played WFRPG  before (in the past, I didnt like the world it was set in, although I love th 40K world - but more recently it's begun to grow on me), and suspect that I will like it more than dnd 5e, at least. High lethality, or at least the risk of serious persistent injuries, are a must however.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1042764That's something I increasingly demand of players from a very early stage (sometimes as early as their second sesh, regardless of system we're using). And I have no problem shearing off narrative descriptions in order to smash through combat if it's gonna be A Thing(tm) or drilling it down to a roll or two if it's just foreplay. Most of my players have been really good about this sort of thing, made it pretty painless honestly.

What the hell are people doing here?

Most players have trouble adding double-digit numbers in their head after rolling a d20. See YouTube vids. Combat halts most game sessions around the table. Doesn't really matter what the game is.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1043027Most players have trouble adding double-digit numbers in their head after rolling a d20. See YouTube vids. Combat halts most game sessions around the table. Doesn't really matter what the game is.

Kinda sad when adults can't do 2nd grade addition...

I've not had major issues at my table with most numeric calculations. Exceptions included Rolemaster (mainly when % of action bits came up and adjusted totals) and Earthdawn (where some things modified the dice step of the pool and some modified the results of the roll without changing the dice step). OTOH, a game like FFG's Star Wars could really drag with all of the spending of Advantages/Threat/Triumph/Despair--sometimes the everyone really is OK with "You succeed/fail, next."

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1042764What the hell are people doing here?

They're engaging in basic arithmetic to add up their modifiers when they roll the dice, but the totals are so low that they just keep missing, so combat lasts a long time. Fights don't end if nobody lands a hit. The announcement says they're going to add more bonuses (more math) to make hits more frequent. How you read that and interpreted it to mean "math is hard" is beyond me.

It seems that the real problem here is less "bad at math" and more "bad at reading comprehension".

I've run WFRP 1e for 3 decades and my goto house rule is +10% WS for PCs. As a result, I've never had combats go overly long. Instead, what happens is wounds are quickly brutal and bodies start hitting the floor. There's more math than OD&D, and thus, combat is a bit slower, but no slower than RQ, GURPS, Palladium Fantasy or most others.

Combats can get slow when players disengage outside of their turn, GMs look up rules etc.

Combat can be fast in any system if the GM is really on top of it, is organised, knows what the pc's defences are and what they need to hit, has initiative order written down, and makes sure players roll their damage along with their attack dice.

My experience is that a lot of GMs just don't do this.

This is when the whiff factor really slows down combat.  If everything go smoothly, it shouldn't, the player misses, the monster attacks and misses, the next player attacks etc, - it shouldn't take long - there's not even any damage to take into account - but if the GM has to ask who's next, get the players' attention, remind the player which monster the player is able to attack, be corrected by another player who notes the gm has forgotten a detail and then the player has to decide what to actually do - then every extra combat turn adds eons to the combat.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1042764Is this really a thing? I mean, truly? ... What the hell are people doing here?

I wonder that a lot, but apparently there is a very wide range of experiences in RPGs.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1042778This ties in with a perception I've been having about recent games.  The idea of a character generating defense feels like it has fallen out of favor entirely.  

What I mean is the idea that a character had a defense they could increase seems almost like a discarded idea.  The idea of having a sword skill or something similar that directly contributes to parrying is something I haven't seen in a while.

The idea of actually having a player ROLL for an active defense?  That seems completely taboo now.

It's been replaced by this idea of static defenses which are influenced by a tiny selection of feat-like add ons.  Sometimes it's not even that.  In some cases it's back to armor being the be all end all of defense like back in the AD&D days.

This is in contrast to ever increasing attack bonuses and percentages.  There's no shortage of ways to increase attack ability.  It's just defense that has fallen out of favor.

A lot of the time there's an inflated hit point system where combat is just a slog of whittling down huge hit point numbers.  It's like game designers have become so frightened of a "miss" and "swinginess" that they'll accept anything other than the idea of an attack roll without damage almost guaranteed.  Everyone has to be able to hit, even though the hit is so inconsequential that it's effectively meaningless.

I don't know.  Maybe it's a false perception.  I don't know if it's relevant here.  Since it's Warhammer, a game with a reputation for lethality, I'd hope not.

Yep. Some people think that ever missing or being blocked or having an attack deflected or dodged or whatever is "boring". And heaven forbid the target be able to do anything about being attacked, especially if it involves them rolling dice. Also, no effects of injuries or else it's a "death spiral" game.

I feel the opposite about all of those opinions, and happily continue using GURPS and even adding complexity to some of those things with house rules.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1043027Most players have trouble adding double-digit numbers in their head after rolling a d20. See YouTube vids. Combat halts most game sessions around the table. Doesn't really matter what the game is.

Yes, and/or they can't remember their own stats or the rules or whatever... "what number do I need to roll to attack successfully [in their usual way, which they may have done the previous turn]? Do I get a modifier for my hoo-ha?"

Quote from: Graewulf;1043031Kinda sad when adults can't do 2nd grade addition...

Yes. Yet players complain about subtraction, division, and having to keep track of a number.

Quote from: TJS;1043050Combats can get slow when players disengage outside of their turn, GMs look up rules etc.

Combat can be fast in any system if the GM is really on top of it, is organised, knows what the pc's defences are and what they need to hit, has initiative order written down, and makes sure players roll their damage along with their attack dice.

Exactly.

Quote from: TJS;1043050My experience is that a lot of GMs just don't do this.

Ya.  It's not that a combat system is so complex it needs to be slow; it's that some GMs don't learn & organize enough to have it play fast, and/or don't help & herd their players to be on the ball.

Quote from: TJS;1043050This is when the whiff factor really slows down combat.  If everything go smoothly, it shouldn't, the player misses, the monster attacks and misses, the next player attacks etc, - it shouldn't take long - there's not even any damage to take into account - but if the GM has to ask who's next, get the players' attention, remind the player which monster the player is able to attack, be corrected by another player who notes the gm has forgotten a detail and then the player has to decide what to actually do - then every extra combat turn adds eons to the combat.

And then they complain about the system being slow, and some game designers design super-simplified games for them.

Quote from: Skarg;1043086it's that some GMs don't learn & organize enough to have it play fast, and/or don't help & herd their players to be on the ball.

Print essential tables on 8.5" x 11" paper and use clear page inserts in a binder. Yes, many GMs are too lazy for this but it works. I used to play Phoenix Command, so I know that complex combat can be done faster.