My deep dive into the WFRP Fourth Edition core rulebook continues. In Part 1 I covered the general system (including how skills work) as well as explaining some disclaimers about my perspective on this review. This part will cover my thoughts on character creation, including Classes and Careers.
Character creation
Character creation is very detailed and has the option to be highly random. You can roll for just about everything, or choose stuff instead – choice is the name of the game here!
So as standard you roll characteristics in order; if you choose to keep those, you get a 50 XP bonus. If not, you can swap them around however you want; if you’re happy, you get a 25 XP bonus. If you’re still not happy, you can reroll everything AND swap them around, and get no XP bonus. Again, this is brilliant – lots of choices, and a small incentive to go with random choices.
Species are the accustomed WFRP choices – Humans (very much the default), Dwarfs, Elves and Halflings. For the first time As in 3rd edition1 High Elves are an option as well as Wood Elves: they have the same characteristic bonuses but different starting skills and talents.
After determining your characteristics you get starting skills and talents (from both your species and your beginning career) and choose your character’s ambitions – as well as deciding on the ambitions for your party. It’s nice thing that there’s a bit of attention give to why your party of disparate ne’er-do-wells is working together.
Characteristics
Characteristics are broadly the same as 2nd edition, with a few additions and subtractions. You now have Initiative and Dexterity as well as Agility – Agility representing acrobatics, jumping etc; Dexterity representing working with your hands; and Initiative representing speed of thought. I can see the thinking behind splitting these out – so Dwarfs would generally have high Dexterity but low Agility, and Initiative now gives you a perception stat. However I do worry that Dexterity is a natural dump stat for anyone who isn’t a lockpicker or card shark!
Every characteristic has a “bonus”, like SB and TB in 2nd edition, and sensibly they no longer waste space by listing a trivially-derived value separately on every single stat block as 2nd Edition did! Wounds are now calculated with reference to S, T and WP rather than being generated for separately. I think this is a fantastic change – no longer can you weirdly have a character with high Toughness but low Wounds (or vice versa).
Fate and Resilience
Fate and Fortune points basically work as they did in WFRP 2e, which I think is fine – you have the same number of Fortune as Fate, and Fortune replenishes at the start of every session (while Fate never replenishes itself). You burn Fate to escape death, and you typically use Fortune points for limited rerolls. Fortune points serve to smooth out the swinginess of the basic percentile system (and also help balance characters since Elves have awesome characteristics but low Fortune). Fate points provide a cushion against the deadliness of the world! As in previous editions, Fate Points are awarded very sparingly (usually only at the end of an adventure). It’s basically a luck characteristic.
Resilience and Resolve are new to this edition. Where Fate represents the gods smiling on you, Resilience represents your inner determination. I have to confess being slightly dubious about this – isn’t that already represented by Willpower?
Anyway, they have the same relationship as Fate and Fortune, respectively. Resilience allows you to temporarily ignore either psychology or the effects of a Critical Wound, or remove a negative Condition – i.e. its a relatively small, temporary benefit. Resolve on the other hand is very hard to replenish but gives a bigger benefit – you either avoid a mutation that you’d otherwise suffer, or you set a dice roll to a specific number. The latter is arguably even more powerful than a Fate Point – Fate could allow you to avoid a hideous attack, while Resolve could also allow you to get a nasty hit on your opponent.
Unlike Fortune (regained at the end of a session), Resolve is regained by acting in accordance with your motivation. So that could be making your friends laugh, helping somebody, getting paid – stuff that can happen relatively often. Like Fate, Resolve is awarded rarely – you to achieve something importance in relation to your motivation.
I like the mechanism for regaining Resolve and Resilience, but I’m not really sure they’re necessary. Resolve in particular seems superfluous. I can see Resilience could be useful in preventing frustration from debilitating conditions or wounds at a crucial point in an encounter. At the end of the day it’s another meta-currency to track, and I’m not wild about that.
Classes
There are now 8 classes – an expansion of 1st edition’s 4 (warrior-ranger-rogue-academic) to add riverfolk (essentially the water version of rangers), peasants (village-based careers), burghers (town/city-based careers) and courtiers (noble-adjacent careers, which includes servants and spies as well as actual nobles and courtiers). Each class contains 8 careers, which are absolutely your traditional WFRP options like ratcatchers, pit fighters, troll slayers and wizard’s apprentices.
I like the idea. I think subdividing the careers into classes should make it easier to choose a class (its very hard to look at a list of 50 careers and try to work out what you want – choosing 1 from 8 followed by another 1 from 8 should be a lot easier).
Careers
Careers are a development of the classic WFRP system in that every single career now has different levels. So you start off as an Apothecary’s Apprentice, then you can move to Apothecary, then Master Apothecary etc. The first level gives you three possible characteristics to advance, 8 skills and a bunch of talents. Each further level gives you another available characteristic to advance, plus more skills and talents. This means that you can remain a Boatman all your life, just rising up through the ranks. Or, as in previous editions, you can move on from Boatman to become a Mercenary or whatever. But you could also remain in the same career level of your career forever – never rising above a Soldier to become a Sergeant, for instance – and advance by buying more and more skill and characteristic advances in those that are already available in your current career. This is a great option to have! It prevents the annoying situation of 1st and 2nd editions where you were quite happy being Boatman, but were forced to change to another career or forfeit any possibility of advancement.
There are some neat new careers (I say new, but they might be in the enormous list of careers in the 2nd Edition Career Compendium somewhere!) such as Artist, Investigator, Warrior Priest and Mystic (I love that Seer, the fourth level of Mystic, actually gets access to some Celestial spells).
There are some disappointments: Priests no longer seem to get access to particular skills related to their deity (e.g. Swim & Sail for Manaan, Command for Myrmidia, Common Knowledge (Dwarves) for Sigmar). This seems like an odd omission – I thought that added some nice character and served to distinguish Initiates of different gods. I suspect the intention is to publish individual careers for priests all the different deities2 but I don’t think it would too much to just include this minor perk in the core rulebook. Wizards seem surprisingly battle-focused: Apprentices get a WS advance (?!) and higher level Wizards get Language (Battle Tongue), Dual Wielding and the like. It feels like maybe they could have done with two different Wizard careers, one for battle mages and one for ivory-towered academics 🙂
In general the career system feels quite good. The GM is specifically encouraged to let players move from one career to another without necessarily starting at the first level of the new career (in fact, one of the pregens in the Starter Set has done this). One thing that has been lost, however, is the inspiration that the career exits provided. No longer is there explicit support for reaching a high level career in multiple ways. So it feels like a Pit Fighter should be able to work his way up to being Judicial Champion, yet that is the fourth level career of Duellist. It feels like Spies should be able to become Assassins, yet that’s the fourth level of the Protagonist career. All these things are possible with the GM’s permission, but it seems a bit odd to create a fairly straightjacketed set of rules for advancement and then just say “oh but you can ignore them if you want”.
Another complaint is that the split of career levels can often feel rather arbitrary or artificial, and in many cases it feels like only three career levels are really necessary (along the lines of student – journeyman – master); even spellcasters have no reason to have four levels any more because of the way the magic system works (see my next post for consideration of that). Breaking down the careers into eight classes has some wisdom – its means you can make a decision more easily since you can choose one of eight followed by one of eight, instead of just one of 64 to begin with! Yet the insistence on having eight careers per class feels distinctly artificial – we really don’t need eight “riverfolk” careers, for instance.
Talents
Talents are an improvement on 2nd edition, because the rules system gives more options for manipulating things. Where 2nd edition talents were often “add +10 to these two skills in this circumstance”, 4th edition has more variety: Talents that allow you to reverse the ones and tens of your roll. Talents that give additional Success Levels. Talents that confer advantage. (It’s also worth pointing out that the boring “+5% to such-and-such characteristic” talents still exist. While they’re still boring, they are actually a bit more useful than in 2nd edition, since you’re essentially getting 5 advances in this characteristic without spending advances – meaning that future advances taken in that characteristic won’t increase in cost – see below.)
There are some talents that are unique to individual careers, like “Slayer” (guess who gets that) which basically makes your Str equal the target’s Toughness if they’re bigger than you. Spies get “Secret Identity” which means they can choose to use a different Status in place of their own. Nice stuff.
Interestingly they’ve also swapped some skills into talents. So Blather is now a talent which uses Charm; Scale Sheer Surface is a talent using Climb. I think this makes sense – Blather always felt like a skill that would see far less use than Charm or Gossip, so making it a talent (which are all basically optional, and need less investment than skills in 4e) seems sensible.
Advancement
Character advancement is highly flexible while also being horrendously complicated. In 1st/2nd edition advances were pretty simple – you just spent 100/50 EP to advance a characteristic by 10/5. You bought a skill or a talent for the same amount (and in 2nd edition you could buy a skill multiple times if you got access to it in multiple careers). You completed a career by getting all of the advances, skills and talents available, and then you could move on to one of its career exits (or you could abandon a career and move to a basic career).
In 4th edition, you buy advances in either characteristics or skills that you career gives you access to in 1% increments. The cost varies depending on how many advances you’ve already taken in that characteristic/skill. There is no limit on how many advances you can take, it just becomes tremendously expensive as you proceed. You can advance any of the characteristic or skill advances from that level of the career or previous levels; for some reason you can only advance talents from that career level, not any previous levels (why?) Oh and you can also advance skills and characteristics that aren’t on your current (or previous) career list, it just costs twice as much.
I can see the logic of cost increasing as you get more talented – it gives you the flexibility of just being able to stay in a single career for your whole life (without being forced to artificially change careers), while avoiding the problem of just being able to (for instance) pump everything into WS and become a combat monster unfeasibly quickly. But it does make character advancement really, really fiddly. I’ve built a lot of sample characters to test out the system and I quickly found that trying to track XP spending was extremely time-consuming.
Not only is system is tremendously complicated, it is not explained particularly well. For instance the fact that you get a free talent on character creation is one little sentence at the end of a paragraph about skills. There’s an example which doesn’t even include the free talent! The rules for completing a career are one paragraph of dense text which took me at least three reads to understand (and its possible I’ve misunderstood them). An example would have helped enormously here.
Interim conclusion
Character creation is largely great – I appreciate the inclusion of all the options for randomly determining aspects of your character, and I like the inclusion of ambitions and motivations. Characteristics are basically an improvement on 2nd Edition’s, and every stat seems to have a reason to be included – with the exception of the inclusion of Resolve/Resilience, which feel like an unnecessary extra thing to track.
Careers are pretty good. These have always been one of WFRP’s big differentiators, and I’m delighted they’re given so much support. There’s a really nice selection here, with many of the classics represented, and I like how they’re split into classes (to aid choice for the inexperienced WFRP player). Career levels are a great idea in the theory, but I find it problematic that the career system feels so straitjacketed to its format. It seems really odd to have multiple levels of Beggar (if you are able to advance, why on earth would you remain a beggar?); some careers just feel like different power levels of the same thing (e.g. Bounty Hunter), and almost all careers feel like they have four levels when three would be perfectly adequate (student > journeyman > guild leader or master).
Character advancement is a mixed bag. It’s nice that you aren’t forced to change career (if you are a Soldier without aspirations of leadership, for instance), and it’s good to have obvious career paths collected (no more jumping about all over the book to follow Wizard’s Apprentice > Journeyman > Master > Wizard Lord). I like that characters can actually switch to any career they like if they spend appropriate XP, and that the rulebook endorses entering a career at a later level if it feels right. It is a shame that without career exits, you’ve lost the aide to imagination that they provided in earlier editions though.
Having moaned about advancement, I have to say that if you want a flexible system, 4th edition definitely delivers. You can choose to advance characteristics, or skills, or both. You can advance them as much as you want. You can get all the available talents in your career level, or just one. Whether or not you complete your current career level, you can choose to advance to the next level of your career, or start a different career. Or you can just stay in your current career level forever and keep advancing your skills and characteristics. There are an impressive array of possibilities here.
The next post will be a break for a spooky adventure in time for Hallowe’en. After that I’ll be back with Part 3 of this review, considering religion and magic in the 4th Edition Rulebook.
Buy the WFRP Fourth Edition rulebook from DriveThruRPG* (as a pdf) or from Cubicle 7 (as a print book).
*This is an affiliate link so I receive a small payment for purchases made using it.
Ill Met by Morrslieb 
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I more or less completely agree with all your points here. There are things to like about 4e’s career system, but it’s ultimately mired in a framework I don’t like much at all.
For me, 3e hit the sweet spot with it’s career system. No career entries/exits (which I know would turn off a lot of people), but each career has a list of 4 key words. Any career can transition into any other career, and each key word in common between the two reduces the XP cost of the transition. And then there are some careers that can only be entered by having completed another career first, e.g. you can only become a Wizard if you’ve completed the Acolyte career, and you can only become an Acolyte if you’ve completed the Apprentice Wizard career. So there was some scope for climbing a particular career ladder if you wanted to, but for most it was much more free-form than other careers.
I think careers, for all that their a fundamental part of WFRP in any edition, are hard to get right. They make a great roleplaying baseline, but it’s difficult to explain what they’re actually meant to be in game terms, which then makes it difficult for the GM to utilise them and for the players to engage with them, especially at the point of transitioning out of that first career. I don’t know what the solution is, but 4e feels a bit too much like having your cake and eating it too for my liking.
Also, just a minor point: 3e was the first edition to have Wood Elves and High Elves as options for PC race/species. Sadly, though, Halflings were relegated to a poorly thought-through addition in a later supplement (along with Ogres).
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Thanks for the info about 3rd edition! The keyword thing does sound interesting. I do think 4e loses something by having no equivalent of career exits and just making every career change essentially “if the GM allows it”.
Having said that I do think the Downtime system (which I’ll review in an upcoming post soon) means that careers make more sense – in 4e they are explicitly “what the PCs do in between adventures”. (It becomes slightly awkward if you’re playing a time-sensitive campaign where there isn’t really time to go off and practice your trade before the next adventure…)
I’ve updated the point about High Elves being playable before 4e!
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I agree that the Downtime system has potential, although I have to admit it’s one of the sections of the rulebook I’ve only skimmed. As you say, though, it’s an awkward fit for certain types of campaign – actually probably most of the long-form published campaigns. I imagine it would work better in a sandbox. I look forward to reading your thoughts.
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