Career Specific Traits Homebrew

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GeneralRykof
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2019 9:24 am

Hey again everyone!

Looking a little quiet over here in ol'2nd Edtion Town! I was going to just add this to my old post but figured I'd see if any old timers are still breathing over here.

I posted several months ago about some homebrew I was working on and wanted to show it again now that it's all complete! I have this over on the Warhammer Fantasy Reddit also.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XVq ... sp=sharing

The (not so) TLDR is that I love Zweihander but chose to keep playing 2nd Edition. There were a lot of things in Zweihander though that I wanted to bring over, one of which being the Career Perks. As anyone who plays 2nd Edition knows there are well over 200 careers in the game, and a LOT of them are so similar in advancements that you probably wouldn’t even know the difference between several of them if the names got swapped. Applying what I saw in Zweihander I added a unique trait to EVERY SINGLE CAREER. That’s every career in the Compendium and the random Chaos careers in the Tome of Corruption just in case somebody goes down that path. Some that worked I took from Zweihander and alllll the others I came up with after months of careful deliberation.

Now I obviously have a lot of other homebrew stuff going on which some of these you might notice don’t really make sense in plain vanilla 2nd Edition, such as the references to Order and Chaos Alignments (another thing from Zweihander I’ve adapted), and I’ve changed magic to be done with just Channeling Tests (since everything else in Warhammer is done with d100 tests except magic for some strange reason). But you should find most things are workable in Vanilla 2nd Edition with very few changes and the few changes that would have to be made shouldn’t be hard to make.



As far as testing goes I’ve played through a one year long campaign with these in effect and then am currently in another 3 month long campaign now using these traits and I have to say that so far the feedback from my players has been really great, they love them and it seems to do exactly what I wanted them to do, which is give careers a special something that when you were playing as them you really felt like you were specialized in that job, whatever it may be.



One thing I saw last time I posted this was some concerns about balance since there is no limit to how many careers you can hop between in 2nd Edition. Other than experience of course. To remedy this I would advise to maybe make this cost 100xp itself as another thing to purchase, but I haven’t had this issue and honestly if you have players who would meta game in such a way that they would change careers every 200 xp just to rack up these traits then 1: I’m flattered, and 2: You should probably just start saying no at some point there.



I did this all just for my games at home here but I figured if it interests even one other person out there then I might as well post it here and see what you guys think. Other than working in some potential Drawbacks for more Advanced Careers this list should be 100% complete and done. That said, obviously if you have any suggestions or things you think should change, I’m all ears and would love to discuss things back and forth!



Thanks for taking the time to read!
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Orin J.
Posts: 514
Joined: Wed Feb 06, 2019 10:39 pm

That's quite a bit of effort, impressive! going through it, but i feel like these might be a bit too powerful for some people's games. reversing dice is "roll 2, pick the highest" in almost all instances after all. gamemaster beware, i guess.
GeneralRykof
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2019 9:24 am

Yeah super true, some of these are very strong, and I'll have to tweak things I'm sure as time goes on and I get to see more of them in action, but I tried to make them fairly specific so you only shine in a few things that it would make sense for that career to excel at which seems fair, it also helps a bit with wiffing when you get a bonus in the thing your career should be good at.

For example, since as a thief you'd swear there wouldn't be any thieves in the old world since every basic thief has like a roughly 40% chance of actually succeeding at anything he tries. They'd weed themselves out in one afternoon of flunking! Exagerated for sure but you get my idea.

In keeping with my logic in balance and power scaling I tried to give more powerful abilities to careers that nobody would want. For example careers like News Sheet Vendor. Any Role Player is going to have to work their imagination pretty hard to think of a situation where you'd be rolling for a random career out of over 200 options and then landing on that and then be excited about it. But give them the ability to flip to succeed on specific things (a powerful ability) and then tie it to something specific about the career (the power of the written word over those who do not have the ability to read) and you open a fun path towards being useful at your specific niche in the world.

It of course at the end of the day is adding something though which is going to make the players more powerful. It will make them succeed more often at the things their characters should be trying which in my head should lend itself to people wanting to try and do the things their characters would naturally lean towards in character. But it also might take away some of the gritty-ness in some peoples eyes. It is my hope that the grit of the game comes not from the character failing Tests but rather from other aspects of the world around them and that's why I think it still works while increasing the fun for players in a lore friendly manner.

Let me know what you think!
FasterThanJesus
Posts: 342
Joined: Thu Jun 20, 2019 4:30 pm
Location: UK

I really like these. They definitely add a little flavour and have some interesting abilities. I agree with Orin that some are on the powerful side, but I think nothing that couldn't be addressed with a little tweaking.

Also, I don't see it being hard to adapt to v4, either!

On the issue of power creep and career hopping, I would suggest that the traits become available after a period within a career (not an extra experience spend). E.g. after spending x experience points within a career the trait is unlocked. Or, after acquiring all skills in a career and/or increasing each available attribute in the advance scheme. This way, it's a reward for specialisation vs career hopping for diversification. It also makes a little RP/realism sense that the character has fully developed into their role.

Also, it's made me a little more interested in Zweihander.
GeneralRykof
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2019 9:24 am

Thanks for the input! Always appreciate reading what other gamers think of the ideas.

I agree with everything you said too. I purposefully never made anything concrete for unlocking the special trait because that's something that's super easy for each dm to decide on what's right for their game and whatever you decide works.

Everything there can of course also be modified if you want to make it less powerful or don't think a certain bonus makes sense just change it! I think the idea is more useful to most people than any of the specifics probably. Obviously there are so many of these that a lot haven't been tested so I'm sure even myself will be having to adjust things as time goes on.

For me personally I would like to adjust the balance by introducing more drawbacks for all the advanced careers that don't have one yet.

On the subject of zweihander Dan the guy who made it is super cool and has the pdf of it available for free. I chose to keep modifying 2e but zweihander is very cool and there's a lot of gems in the system and it's all easy to modify for 2e since it in itself is a byproduct of 2e. I would look at it and see what you think!
KonradHelt
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Apr 24, 2021 10:48 am

Great work, I'll actually ask my players to take a look at it and see if we should use it.

A question, I see some references to "flip" for effect, could you explain what you mean by that?
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Hyarion
Posts: 260
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:56 am

It's been a while, so someone please correct me if necessesary, but to "flip" the dice is to reverse the numbers. "Flip to fail" would be to take the 38 that you rolled and treat it as a 83 if that would make your fail. "Flip to succeed" is the opposite.
I hold the glaive of Law against the Earth.
KonradHelt
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Apr 24, 2021 10:48 am

Thank you, got it!
Knight of the Lady
Posts: 184
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:04 am

Awesome idea!

I believe that I shall pester my GM when I can RP again about this. Certainly something which I think would make things very interesting as well as give a reason to try out new careers.
KonradHelt
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Apr 24, 2021 10:48 am

I'm going to be using these in a couple of month for a new campaign, so first of thanks again for sharing!

Secondly, would you be okay with me editing them for vanilla wfrp 2nd ed and resharing in this threat?

Lastly, could you share the rules for spell casting you are using?

Thank you 🙂
GeneralRykof
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2019 9:24 am

KonradHelt wrote: Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:23 pm I'm going to be using these in a couple of month for a new campaign, so first of thanks again for sharing!

Secondly, would you be okay with me editing them for vanilla wfrp 2nd ed and resharing in this threat?

Lastly, could you share the rules for spell casting you are using?

Thank you 🙂
Hey! Super sorry about not getting back to you on this. I honestly stopped checking this post for a long time until I randomly went back to reread it!
I'm overjoyed that some of you are finding this stuff cool/useful and absolutely would be ok with you using or editing this for anything you'd like. If you have ideas for changes that you've made let me know here too and I'd love to see them.

Let me know if you're still interested in the rest of my homebrewed rules such as magic and I'd be more than happy to post them and go over it with you!
KonradHelt
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Apr 24, 2021 10:48 am

I would love to see your magic rules! We are still facing some challenges with using the old WFRP 2ed rules for that. The vif factor is nearly gone from combat with the changes we have made, but magic still faces some challenges.

For now, we are playing with the WFRP 2ed rules with these changes to the core rules, mainly to speed up combat as we are a big group (8 players and me as GM).

I edited your excellent abilities to fit the rules above, and they should also be usable with the standard WFRP 2ed rules now. Our version is here .

Thank you for the inspiration!
GeneralRykof
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2019 9:24 am

KonradHelt wrote: Tue May 10, 2022 2:14 am I would love to see your magic rules! We are still facing some challenges with using the old WFRP 2ed rules for that. The vif factor is nearly gone from combat with the changes we have made, but magic still faces some challenges.

For now, we are playing with the WFRP 2ed rules with these changes to the core rules, mainly to speed up combat as we are a big group (8 players and me as GM).

I edited your excellent abilities to fit the rules above, and they should also be usable with the standard WFRP 2ed rules now. Our version is here .

Thank you for the inspiration!
Oh boy, I can already tell I have way more to talk about than I can type out. We should chat on discord! I love what I'm seeing with your homebrew. I'm sure there's stuff I can steal from that and hopefully vice versa. Maybe we can improve on both of our magic systems.

You can add me as Rykof#1834.

Let me know if you want an alternative way to communicate incase you don't use discord.
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