WFRP 4e House Rules

Opposed Rolls

Essentially a simplification on the 4e rules.

• If both parties succeed at the skill test, the party with the highest roll wins
• If both parties fail, the party with the lowest roll wins 
• If Success Level is required use the value of the tens die
• If both failed the winner's Success Level = 0

Example

Magdalena is locked in melee combat with Sir Vaksman. She is armed with a sword and has Melee(Basic) 69, Sir Vaksman is not quite so great, also armed with a sword he's got Melee(Basic) 54. Round 1 Magdalena gets a 52 and Sir Vaksman rolls a 17. Both have rolled under their respective skill values, but Magdalena's roll being higher means she wins, and as its a 52 that equals 5 Success Levels, meaning +5 Wounds damage. Brutal. Round 2 she gets a 71 and he a 58, both fail, but as Sir Vaksman's roll is lower he wins the round, though with no Success Levels, so no modifier to damage.

Rationale

Combat in WFRP involves way too much arithmetic for me, I find it can be overwhelming when there's a lot of combatants and slows everything down. This system is functionally the same as the rules as written, but does away with having to subtract dice roll from Skill value to determine Success Levels which then have to be compared before the SL is applied. Simply compare dice rolls, if both succeed the highest roll wins with the tens die being used for the SL. So fast and elegant.

My only reticence with this is that we've been playing percentile game systems for so long that our reactions to low dice rolls are virtually Pavlovian. I changed Criticals from being on doubles to rolls of 01-3 for that reason, and although we're sticking with that we'll just need see how we got on with any dissonance caused by this new change.

I came across this opposed resolution mechanic in an Idle Cartulary review of the Horror game Fear & Panic. I'd been planning to write and post this since making the change, then the other day I was watching Seth Skorkowsky's enticing review of Delta Green and he mentioned that it uses this mechanic too, with the added wrinkle that in the case of fails the lowest wins. This detail somehow feels more satisfying to me than Fear and Panic's highest fail wins. We'll see how it all feels after some proper usage, which hopefully the next few game sessions should provide...  

Melee Combat: Polearms

All Polearm weapons (except for Quarterstaff) can be used at a range of 1, i.e. they can be used to attack an opponent who is 2m (1 square) away and thus not in base-base contact.

Melee Combat: Reloading

Reloading a weapon while adjacent to an opponent automatically grants initiative to the opponent along with 1 point of Advantage should they wish to attack you immediately (which you can only oppose with Dodge). Note the opponent does not gain an extra attack from this, it simply alters the initiative order and gives them advantage.