Chuck wrote: ↑Wed May 29, 2019 8:56 am
I guess I understand what the designers were attempting to do, but I imagine it just flat out doesn't work in play: too many modifiers, too many stacked effects, too many rolls -- one roll to strike, another to generate the crit effect, a third to determine hit location, UGH. Combat is already the worst part of the game for me as a GM, and this new system just looks like a tarpit.
I'm afraid you're spot on.
While most exchanges involve two rolls, one from the attacker and one from the defender, already there you have many moving parts
* determining the winner, applying modifiers from each combatant's weapon, even ammunition have Qualities with modifiers, the Combat Difficulty table, Talents and Monster Traits, earlier crits... Equipment can have general Qualities that affect combat. If the enemy isn't medium-sized, that not only adds modifiers per se, it also modifies your weapon on the fly!
* determining the SL of the winner using subtraction, which again might mean applying modifiers from Talents (some of which grant +SL if you succeed, which is not the same thing as winning)
* adding up the weapon's Damage rating, Characteristic Bonus, and SL, deducting APs and Toughness to arrive at Wound loss
But this is only the beginning. The combined probability of having to resolve at least one critical hit or fumble is 19% for each attack, so you can be sure this is very likely to happen each and every combat round more than once.
While armor negation does save you from having to resolve criticals, it does involve book-keeping to record armor damage (and later: administering the costs of repairing that armor).
Once you do look at a critical, whether from rolling a double or from going into negative Wounds, this is seldom just two more rolls (one for location, one to determine the actual crit) - many many crits trigger further die rolling. Not to speak of how almost every Condition requires an end-of-round die roll to see if you get rid of it! Add to this the book-keeping of recording Conditions and keeping track of the various modifiers each Condition gives.
Then add the Talents and Traits that grant you more attacks. I have had the misfortune of having two players take Dual Wielder (maybe it shows they're grizzled old WFRP1 veterans
), nuff said.
So even armor negation aside, as soon as a combatant drops to 0 Wounds, you're
easily looking at five die rolls every time someone successfully attacks that combatant: attack, parry, crit location, crit result, and end-of-round condition. That's a lot of math, table lookup, and modifiers for one single attack.
In my honest opinion, WFRP4 is
overwhelmingly more detailed than either 1E or 2E. Each and every combat becomes so cluttered with details and modifiers from half a dozen different rules that we had to create a Combat Sheet to track it all.
