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 BaronIveagh wrote:
BoLs is suggesting to wait and see how the packages change over the days following the launch. Since all in seems a bit... much.

Ya... I'd like to see something in between. Maybe core introductory set, a couple of card as the adventure for the price of a 40K starter box.

Chairman Aeon wrote:

 warboss wrote:
What was wrong with the Shadowrun versions? That's (for this day and age) a very crunchy ruleset that you'd think would benefit from handy dandy reminder cards.

Depends on who you ask. Some people didn't like that the gear card's focus is an image and the crunchy bits are smaller text. Some complained they didn't have all the rules/stats. The spell cards are stark and rules forward, but incomprehensible unless you know all the one letter types. I'd say the gear cards are good for beginners and if you can decipher the spell cards you probably don't need them as you probably have memorized all the stuff on the cards.

Also poker cards are kind of small to get all that would be useful on them. Now tarot sized cards...

In a crunchy game like that, I'd definitely expect to have the full rules/stats listed on a card you're specifically buying as a game aid. With 40k W&G, it looks abstracted enough that it probably won't be an issue at least from the snippets we've seen so far.

Additional characters for Free RPG Day: https://www.ulisses-us.com/wrath-glory-additional-characters-for-free-rpg-day/

They look very cool

Why do character sheets include objectives?

 jonolikespie wrote:
Why do character sheets include objectives?

I expect they grant an exp bonus when completed in order to hand hold..sorry I mean guide... players in their roleplaying

 jonolikespie wrote:
Why do character sheets include objectives?

At the start of the session you role a dice on this table, the result will be your objective for the session.

It asks you to roleplay your character in a certain way (depending on your character background) and if you do it you'll get a wrath point to use in the session. You can use wrath point for reroll for example.

A nice little bonus to help player roleplaying without feeling forced.

I dunno man. Being told what to roleplay based on a dice-role seems pretty forced...

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I dunno man. Being told what to roleplay based on a dice-role seems pretty forced...

It's not mandatory and the bonus is nice but not so important. You can clearly do without that.
But I clearly welcome a mechanic like this to give a little push for players to roleplay.

 TheGuest wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I dunno man. Being told what to roleplay based on a dice-role seems pretty forced...

It's not mandatory and the bonus is nice but not so important. You can clearly do without that.
But I clearly welcome a mechanic like this to give a little push for players to roleplay.

It almost sounds a little like a more overt version of 5e Background system, in that it exists to nudge players towards playing in character when, absent of that system, it'd be a bit overwhelming for them. Some players will skip right over that and know exactly what they want to play, but for new players it can be quite a daunting task to step into character, especially in a setting with as deep a mythos as 40k has.

If someone comes to this after a few months in 40k and elects to play a Battle Sister (a faction that hardly gets a ton of coverage in the core 40k background books, compared to Marine or Guard or Orks), it's entirely possible (especially if the rest of the table is more experienced) that they'll be worried about playing that character 'wrong' and committing some lore faux-pas, so having these hints for the less confident player might just provide that little extra nudge. Once everyone's comfortable, they can easily be ignored, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having a handrail to guide newer players.

Those of us here can sometimes forget that the HUGE amount of 40K canon can be intimidating to new players.

I'm OK with a nudge for newer players, and grognards can easily ignore it.

 schoon wrote:
Those of us here can sometimes forget that the HUGE amount of 40K canon can be intimidating to new players.

I'm OK with a nudge for newer players, and grognards can easily ignore it.

Yeah, all the whining about these features seems to me trite and elitist.
I don't need to know how to roleplay a Chaos Space Marine. But for someone looking to enter the genre/medium, what to do? Buy a feth-ton of books and read, making the game a chore?
This is a helpful and welcome addition to the game that will do more good than harm - if you have realized that it in no way supports you, realize that you were never going to need it anyway.
And besides, it's not like this is the first time we've had entire tables to help make more believable 40k characters.

If it helps people new to the 40k setting or RPing in general than that's great I suppose but I really can't stand mechanics like that so I already know what the first thing that's gonna get houserulled out is...

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I dunno man. Being told what to roleplay based on a dice-role seems pretty forced...

Is there a dice roll involved? That kinda mechanics usually involve getting rewarded when acting in line with the character cues.

 Albertorius wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I dunno man. Being told what to roleplay based on a dice-role seems pretty forced...

Is there a dice roll involved? That kinda mechanics usually involve getting rewarded when acting in line with the character cues.

The character sheets list 6 'objectives' that're things like threaten people with your Inquisitional Rosette or call upon your faith in the Emperor and it's listed under 'D6' and 'results', so yeah you seem to be rolling them which I'd definitely call forced..

We'll certainly need to see what the mechanics are, if any.

<goes check>

Huh. So it does look like a table to roll on, yeah. Maybe it's supposed to be used to roll at the start of an adventure to get a "secondary objective" for the character, and if you achieve it you get extra XP or something.

As TheGuest points out up there ^ that's exactly what happens, but it's once per session. Or you could pick one, I suppose, or simply not bother. I've never yet played an RPG where we used all the rules, and the world hasn't ended yet.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
As TheGuest points out up there ^ that's exactly what happens, but it's once per session. Or you could pick one, I suppose, or simply not bother. I've never yet played an RPG where we used all the rules, and the world hasn't ended yet.

I'd dare to say that any RPG played strictly to the rules is the worst gaming experience you'll likely ever have.

Neronoxx wrote:
But for someone looking to enter the genre/medium, what to do? Buy a feth-ton of books and read, making the game a chore?

Or, you know, spend thirty minutes reading a couple of wiki pages. And hey, maybe I'm odd, but if I'm going to commit the time and effort to participate in a proper RPG, it's going to be for a setting I find appealing and thus would not consider doing basic character research for a "chore".

I mean, the rule seems easy enough to ignore, but no matter how many times people refer to them online, these completely fresh new players without even the most cursory knowledge of the setting and system(regardless of which ones we're talking about) remain a complete unicorn IRL as far as I've experienced.

 Yodhrin wrote:

Neronoxx wrote:
But for someone looking to enter the genre/medium, what to do? Buy a feth-ton of books and read, making the game a chore?

Or, you know, spend thirty minutes reading a couple of wiki pages. And hey, maybe I'm odd, but if I'm going to commit the time and effort to participate in a proper RPG, it's going to be for a setting I find appealing and thus would not consider doing basic character research for a "chore".

I mean, the rule seems easy enough to ignore, but no matter how many times people refer to them online, these completely fresh new players without even the most cursory knowledge of the setting and system(regardless of which ones we're talking about) remain a complete unicorn IRL as far as I've experienced.

Hey I have ready all three Siege of Vraks Imperial Armour books and while I learned a great deal about the structure and doctrine of Krieg Siege Armies, I would still have appreciated some more personal level quirks to orient myself for a Deathrider Only War campaign. 40k is foremost a wargaming setting and looking for personal inspiration beyond a few cool quotes and half-paragraph vignettes is not exactly straightforward.

 Yodhrin wrote:

I mean, the rule seems easy enough to ignore, but no matter how many times people refer to them online, these completely fresh new players without even the most cursory knowledge of the setting and system(regardless of which ones we're talking about) remain a complete unicorn IRL as far as I've experienced.

That just shows the limits of your experience then, I guess.

My first Dark Heresy campaign consisted of 4 players, who had all roleplayed before, but only one of them had any real knowledge of 40K. Although we managed to get people up to speed to the broad lines of the setting and their character concept with a few sessions of play, I am sure most of the 40K rookies would have been happy to have a mechanic like the one described up-thread to guide them along.

It's a good idea for those who are stumped or new to the setting, and I like this sort of thing with systems that let you replenish a "drama point" resource through roleplaying. It's just the "random" bit that has me scratching my head.

On another topic, do we yet know if the base RPG will have rules for vehicle / spaceship combat?

 Yodhrin wrote:

Neronoxx wrote:
But for someone looking to enter the genre/medium, what to do? Buy a feth-ton of books and read, making the game a chore?

Or, you know, spend thirty minutes reading a couple of wiki pages. And hey, maybe I'm odd, but if I'm going to commit the time and effort to participate in a proper RPG, it's going to be for a setting I find appealing and thus would not consider doing basic character research for a "chore".

I mean, the rule seems easy enough to ignore, but no matter how many times people refer to them online, these completely fresh new players without even the most cursory knowledge of the setting and system(regardless of which ones we're talking about) remain a complete unicorn IRL as far as I've experienced.

All wiki pages, and indeed most lore for 40K is done from a highly removed level. Just because there is a wiki article on the particular subject, doesn't mean it will hold anything at all relevant to roleplaying a character successfully from that group.

And I suspect there's reasons you are not encountering them. Or more likely not noticing them. Like I said, we know more, and that places us in groups of similar people as far as knowledge goes.
I don't go search out newbies. But they do exist.

Shouln't the rulebook itself have enough background to get going?

I know someone referred to previous tables that were presented as an optional use for background guides, but these are in game effects. In my experience, whilst happy to ignore background generators and such, a lot of players don't like to ignore crunch.

Also a single line you have to say per session is not much of a guide. It is however going to lead to some very repetitive dialogue and games with chracters saying the same stuff over an over.

Also yes you can ignore it, but that is true of literally every shortcoming ever isn't it? Doesn't make the critique of the system less valid.

Not a fan of those secondary objective things. Rather than being 'encouragement to roleplay' they more often act as encouragement to do something arbitrary and nonsensical for mechanical advantage. Need your wrath points refreshed? Just ramble on about some background detail with no relevance to the current scene and there it is!

From what I've seen of the rules, it doesn't look like a terribly well written system. The free RPG day version is full of confusing terminology. There's an initiative stat, initiative system which has nothing to do with the initiative stat, seizing the initiative, which does affect initiative, but isn't based on initiative and a separate initiative system which is bases on initiative in case it isn't clear who goes first under the usual initiative system. It isn't consistent on what to call damage dice (either +ED or +BD, apparently at random). It's not at all clear what actions an exhausted character can do. The wrath dice doesn't interact with wrath points at all, instead generating glory and ruin points. Randomly adding plus signs into rules which don't seem to need them, like 'reduce difficulty by +rank' where rank is always a positive number. No explanation of whether you can get a shift from an exalted icon which was only partially spent to meet your difficulty. Things which increase difficulty and add dice don't have symmetrical effects, so you need +3 dice to make up for +2 difficulty.

Although the examples show normal D6, the system seem to be written for special dice with faces showing 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2 symbols.

It seems that it's difficult to get killed if you are a PC (~80% chance of survival without medical attention when reduced to 0 wounds) but rather easy to get knocked unconscious with no clear method of recovery.

Here is the thing, the way Wrath & Glory is presenting itself primarily a sandbox system. It's tiered character system designed so you can play whatever you want from a broad range of classes and races from wildly different backgrounds (as opposed to a more focused system on just space marines for example). That isn't a criticism by the way, in fact it is great!

It is not newcomer friendly lore/roleplay wise though. Whereas a focused book can give enough detail in book so that new players can get a handle on how to rolepay a character, I think W&G will struggle to cover all it has set out to include. It's page count is less that Dark Heresy, yet it covers far, far more ground lore wise. I don't think a D6 line prompt system is going to help much with that (especially as it doesn't on its own contextualise what you're saying). The disadvantage to a gamification of roleplay is that is sets arbitrary targets that players will set out to meet regardless of context. For example, if ever combat results in xp, you can bet your bottom dollar players will always choose to initiate combat.

Also, lets get a little more realistic about 'newcomers' here. The hypothetical newcomer who benefits from this system has (a) neither played or experienced warhammer 40k, (b) has no experience with any other roleplaying system, and (c) bought (at a high price point) and read this book long enough to get to this snippet and would have been discouraged but for it. I will leave it to you to decide how likely that is.

A better example of newcomer encouragement is the 'example of play' comic. 'Show don't tell' is miles better for encouraging and visualising roleplay.

 Grinshanks wrote:
Shouln't the rulebook itself have enough background to get going?

Yeah for me this is actually a rather important point. I sorta expect that by buying the essential books for an RPG I'll get enough knowledge of the setting to play in it.

In my group only the GM has the rulebook, so that's a bit of a non-starter for getting new players up to speed.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
In my group only the GM has the rulebook, so that's a bit of a non-starter for getting new players up to speed.

So how would they get up to speed without use of the rule book?

My GM is the only own who owns the rulebook, but we are allowed to read it (or at least have him paraphrase the rules/background to us). All of that is based on what is in the book (or from existing experience, in which case we are not new players).

The D6 objective tables and/or the background lore are contained in the rule book anyway, they don't exist separately to it. So I am not sure what you advocating.

The pre-order bundles do come with digital files as well, those can always be shared with the rest of the group to keep everybody up to speed with the rules.

When we did Rogue Trader I personally had all the books, but the group had access to the relevant core and splatbooks digitally to make things easier for the others.