Power creep?

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WarAndPaint
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jan 11, 2022 1:31 pm

I'm going to play 2e as I own a good bit of the material but never actually played it, however I have a bit of trepidation and I'd like some advice.

What draws me to wfrp, like many I'm sure, is the lack of D&D style heroicness of the average PC. In fact, this is such a major drive to me that even the possibility of eventually becoming 'overpowered' bothers me.

So to cut a long story short, does this inevitably happen in wfrp 2e? Are the end advanced careers massively overpowering or are they still vulnerable to fairly normal enemies and situations?

If so, are there any ways to limit it?

I've decided I am not going to use skill mastery for a start.

Thanks for any input!
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Hyarion
Posts: 260
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:56 am

Some scattered thoughts orbiting a central theme, here we go:

To start, it depends on your definition of *over*powered. Similar numbers of similar enemies will cease to be a threat in the same perilous sense to a party consisting of a Thug, Hedge Wizard, Herbalist, Merchant when compared to thousands of xp later and that party is a Captain, Master Wizard, Assassin, and Master Thief. To be sure, in WFRP, any enemy can get lucky dice and can put a serious hurt and/or death on a PC, but I'll stress again my words above "similar numbers of similar enemies...".

With that said, it is not inevitable and there are plenty of things you can do as a GM to avoid the situations you don't appear to like.
- You can run shorter campaigns and then retire characters earlier (though your players may eventually get a bit resentful of being closed off from the upper tier careers).
- You can scale back the amount of Gold/XP you hand out so that players to flatten out the power growth curve (xp for skills, gold for gear).
- Embrace the gear scarcity levels in OWA and the Core book and make the search for rare gear an adventure in and of itself.
- Give your party appropriate threats to deal with. D&D approached this with their tier levels (level 1-4 local heroes, 5-10 national heroes, 11-16 world heroes, 17-20 cosmic heroes). As a GM of any game system, this is an important concept to grasp. The Thug/Merchant/Herbalist/Hedgewise party above might struggle to deal with some outlaws but the Captain/Assassin/MThief/MWizard party they'll grow into won't struggle *as much*, but they shouldn't be dealing with outlaws, they should be dealing with major chaos incursions and delicate inter-fiefdom diplomacy. It really just boils down to your ability to scale the enemies and the adventures to where your party is at.
I hold the glaive of Law against the Earth.
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Wyrmslayer
Posts: 28
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 12:44 pm

The campaign was stingy with exp so we avoided becoming behemoths of power through that method. Think we get half the recommended exp', that felt too much of a reduction but it kept the GM happy.

PC's remained vulnerable to all threats. Be they trash mobs attacking in high numbers and getting ganging up bonuses, or powerful npc's, and even just regular npc's played to their strengths with a leader given the "brute" type of modifiers to their standard bestiary entry.
It can happen that a mighty chaos troll crashes through trees towards a camp of PC's that have detected it and manage to take it down before it manages to raise its club, but that's a memorable occasion and worthy of a smile rather than a sneer (not that I'm suggesting anyone would).

I wouldn't recommend ditching the Skill mastery, it was just a good mechanic. Rather than a means to become awesome, it addressed the problem wfrp1 had in that skills were binary, so a person doing x for years could be superceded by a person that just learnt it if the base stat' was better. In many cases the skill mastery soaked up exp that could have been aimed at levelling up faster towards awesomeness.
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