Been pondering a game mechanics change today, specific to our Warhammer FRP campaign. Long ago, we used to play Rolemaster extensively, our group was particularly fond of the more realistic and deadly tone of combat, and the flexibility of the spell systems. However, the character generation mechanics always felt lacking, so over the years we heavily tweaked and modified those pieces. The latest iteration was a heavily changed Pathfinder-based ruleset, which kept the same flavor, but was much more modernized.
On the other hand, the current version of Warhammer Fantasy, the 4th edition, has a very robust and details character generation system. It is a system I particularly favor, with the methodology to grow and evolve your character, without being locked into “classes” and without having the complete freedom of a point-based system. Where Warhammer falls down, at least for our group, is in the physical combat mechanics. Advantage is fundamentally a good idea, but the implementation is confusing and challenging at best, especially when tracking multiple foes. Criticals are supposed to be scary (and are), but rather rarely seem to come up, except to serve as final kill flavor – most of the criticals destroy the character’s playability or just kill them outright. And combat modifiers are very difficult to track and manage, since the ruleset is not really designed for game board tactical style play.
However, these two games are fairly easily compatible – they both use a percentage-based system, and the worlds are similar enough to transfer. By taking the best of both – Warhammer’s character system and Rolemaster’s combat tables and rules, I think it would be possible to make a much stronger combination – something I will refer to as Warmaster
We will be doing some play testing and scenarios likely over the next couple of weeks, and if successful, posting our notes. For the actual campaign, my plan is not to retrofit it in the middle of the action. Specifically, we are at the ending of Chapter 1, it would be unbalanced to swap over mechanics mid-battle.
