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Author Topic: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e  (Read 4252 times)

Batjon

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #15 on: September 30, 2022, 03:14:55 PM »
I own SotS but something about it turns me off.

My sword & sorcery game of choice is Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic Edition.

Tantavalist

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #16 on: September 30, 2022, 06:37:45 PM »
SotS is a good game, but while it bills itself as Sword & Sorcery it very much isn't. Not the setting, and not the rules. Barbarians of Lemuria would still be the go-to S&S system for me as well purely because that's the one game whose magic system perfectly encapsulates what the Sorcery half of the name should feel like.


What I did with WFRP was to just completely re-work the Investigative Abilities. This is very easy to do because in general the mechanics for IAs are the same for each one- you're just using the fluff to determine if a player can spend that point in that way in this situation. I handled Careers by having the careers be IAs be Careers- Rat Catcher, Beggar and Stevedore are all IAs. Stevedore for instance would all for Investigative spends when asking questions and picking up rumours in dockside taverns, but also to give bonuses when physical strength or endurance are important.

I also made up other IAs as needed. Ever-popular WFRP staples like Flee! and Blather work very well as IAs. The hardest part was adapting the magic system, but that was pulled off in the end. The Wizard character was the one who ended up most resembling a SotS class in that it took several related IAs that work together to make things work.

King Tyranno

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #17 on: October 01, 2022, 08:49:26 AM »
I am trying to decide my next fantasy RPG between WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e. 

Which do you feel is the better game mechanically? Which is the best setting?

For me WFRP wins easily. 4E is a great return to form after the Chaos Spawn that was 3e. I do add some of the character creation rules from Zwiehander because even though I'm loath to give the obnoxious prat who made it credit I think he did do a decent job of cleaning up and adding to WFRP. Even if you're not all that interested in Warhammer I think WFRP is the best game for dark fantasy games in general. Although I want to try Shadow of the Demon Lord and Goblin Slayer RPG at one point. They sound interesting too.

weirdguy564

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #18 on: October 02, 2022, 09:28:19 PM »
If you want a grim/dark fantasy game the one that keeps coming up as a good substitute for Warhammer Fantasy is called Warlock!

The game is a lot simpler.  It only uses the D20 and D6 dice.  Characters are stated out with their skills, their stamina, and their luck. 

It’s got a neat character generation system where you start with four randomly chosen careers, and you pick one you like.  None of them are powerful or cool, like footpad, or rat catcher.  The cool class careers exist, but comes later as a prestige class.  You also get two background details randomly rolled that the GM can use for adventure hooks. 

Magic has some serious downsides.  It can result in crippling and permanent mutations when miss cast.  Have fun.  I’ll stick to swords. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/383512
« Last Edit: October 03, 2022, 02:18:42 PM by weirdguy564 »
I’m glad for you if you like the top selling game of the genre.  Me, I like the road less travelled, and will be the player asking we try a game you’ve never heard of.

igor

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #19 on: October 03, 2022, 10:06:44 AM »
To cover The Dark Eye 5e for a moment.
It has a lovely setting that is a lot like a less grimdark, less filthy version of the Warhammer setting. Power level is roughly similar, allthough TDE has more magic. Not more powerful, but more reliable, more diverse and more people who can do magic.
Character creation is a pain, but it plays surprisingly smoothly. The good thing about TDE's system of character creation is that compared to Warhammer it allows for the creation of really distinctive and extremely varied characters.

In the end it depends on the players. If they aren't gearheads and also don't like using premade characters, I'd discourage using TDE.

Batjon

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #20 on: October 03, 2022, 07:24:31 PM »
If you want a grim/dark fantasy game the one that keeps coming up as a good substitute for Warhammer Fantasy is called Warlock!

The game is a lot simpler.  It only uses the D20 and D6 dice.  Characters are stated out with their skills, their stamina, and their luck. 

It’s got a neat character generation system where you start with four randomly chosen careers, and you pick one you like.  None of them are powerful or cool, like footpad, or rat catcher.  The cool class careers exist, but comes later as a prestige class.  You also get two background details randomly rolled that the GM can use for adventure hooks. 

Magic has some serious downsides.  It can result in crippling and permanent mutations when miss cast.  Have fun.  I’ll stick to swords. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/383512

I'm a fan of rules-lite games but this game was just too lite for me.  I like a good array of attributes and a small but robust skill list usually.

ForgottenF

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #21 on: October 04, 2022, 10:19:10 PM »
Generally I agree with others here that WFRP's strong suit is its setting. The Old World gets a lot of grief for being derivative of the works of Tolkien and Michael Moorcock, but they've built on it over the years such that it is now a legitimately great fantasy setting (so of course Games Workshop nuked it). Can't speak for the adventures, personally. The only one I've played in was "Rough Nights and Hard Days", and I dropped out of it about 2/3 of the way through because I found it to be obnoxiously railroad-y. That may have been the GM, though. I never went back and read through the module.

As far as the system goes, it is by no means a bad game, but it is extremely crunchy, and has a few too many useless professions. Personally I don't care much for the whole "roll for chaos corruption" approach to magic, but it is kind of intrinsic to the setting.

I don't have any experience with Dark Eye, but based on some of the things said here, I'm going to get a hold of the pdf and give it a read-through. 

Edit: If someone did want to run the WFRP setting in a different game, I would probably vote Shadow of the Demon Lord as the best substitute. It uses a similar occupation system, and is thematically almost identical, while being a substantially simpler game. I've also considered it for campaign set in the world of Demon's Souls, but that was just idle fancy.
« Last Edit: October 04, 2022, 10:23:29 PM by ForgottenF »

ForgottenF

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #22 on: October 04, 2022, 10:20:04 PM »
If you want a grim/dark fantasy game the one that keeps coming up as a good substitute for Warhammer Fantasy is called Warlock!

The game is a lot simpler.  It only uses the D20 and D6 dice.  Characters are stated out with their skills, their stamina, and their luck. 

It’s got a neat character generation system where you start with four randomly chosen careers, and you pick one you like.  None of them are powerful or cool, like footpad, or rat catcher.  The cool class careers exist, but comes later as a prestige class.  You also get two background details randomly rolled that the GM can use for adventure hooks. 

Magic has some serious downsides.  It can result in crippling and permanent mutations when miss cast.  Have fun.  I’ll stick to swords. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/383512

I'm a fan of rules-lite games but this game was just too lite for me.  I like a good array of attributes and a small but robust skill list usually.

Agreed. I went back and forth on using Warlock! for a while, but I don't think I like a game without attributes.

igor

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #23 on: October 05, 2022, 02:55:45 AM »
Here is the crux, I think.

Warhammer fantasy rpg is great for playing traditional Warhammer style fantasy scenarios. It's a lot less great for anything else.

TDE and its setting are a bit more flexible. They are great at Game of Thrones* style stuff and The Hobbit style stuff and everything in between.

Both suck at D&D style high powered fantasy.

*The big difference between the GoT universe and Aventuria the TDE setting is, that the GoT go to solution of I'm cruel, treacherous and into incest, so I will always win, will get you into a lot of very painful trouble if applied in Aventuria.

ForgottenF

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #24 on: October 05, 2022, 08:06:11 AM »
Ok, so I did go and start flipping through the Dark Eye corebook, and....are they trolling? Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of skill checks being tied to multiple attributes. (It's something I've included in my own homebrew rules.) But three dice rolls, with each one potentially having points spent on modifying it, just for a simple skill check?

To the people here that have played the game, am I missing something? That sounds like an atrocious rule which would lead to one of the slowest playing RPGs on the market.

igor

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #25 on: October 05, 2022, 10:40:29 AM »
You are supposed to roll 3d20's at once read them left to right.

Or possibly.

Roll 3d20's at once that are colour coded. Each attribute has an official colour, so you know which die goes with which attribute.

I totally agree that it is conceptually stupid, but it works pretty well in play and it allows very detailed determination of why and how well you succeed or fail.


igor

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #26 on: October 05, 2022, 10:51:59 AM »
In practice, I think the problem lies more inside the combat rules. Combat flows at roughly half the speed of traditional D&D combat. Also, getting hurt will impact your ability to function significantly.

So avoiding the D&D approach of: 'starting a fight is always an option' is the way to go.




Brooding Paladin

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #27 on: October 05, 2022, 12:03:21 PM »
We've been playing TDE 5 for the last year and a half and it's gone pretty well.  We even enjoyed the character creation.  That runs more like GURPS where you have points allocated and you can build whatever you like.  Invariably, someone builds the rogue, the wizard, etc. but there's a lot more flexibility there.

The skills with the 3d20's really aren't so bad.  I like the fact that it yields a Quality Level that allows me, as the GM, to bake in some, "You get it done, but there's this small (or large) consequence as a result."  Sort of like the FFG Star Wars dice.  That part actually flows pretty quickly. 

Combat, as has been said, is a bit of a different animal and does tend to run slower.  The spells, which I feel are kind of limited and underpowered, take a while to cast, but this actually creates decent balance between the casters and the martial types.

I like the armor soak, the chance to parry/dodge an attack, but it does get fiddly.  Conceptually I really like those things but in practice it tends to slow things down.  And nobody likes rolling high for a "hit" only to have their enemy deflect what was going to be a powered-up hit.  So I've pretty much stopped giving that power to the baddies and just given them more hit points (as my own house rule).

TDE is a little different conceptually, as well.  If your group likes fighting monsters you'll find that this game is really more focused on using your character skills to solve problems, investigate, etc.  That's why you can literally roll up a chocolcatier, a dike engineer, a farmer, etc.  Everyone brings their various skills together to do stuff.  The VERY small and limited bestiary makes it plain that this game really isn't all about the hack and slash.  My group was raised on D&D and Pathfinder, so I've converted a few monsters and brought those in and everyone seems to be having a good time.

I will say that I feel like the pantheon is a little uninspired.  More could have been done with it, for sure, but it's serviceable.  What I most dislike about it is that there's really only one "bad guy god" and a dozen demons running around.  I like having a broader base of bad guys at work so there are competing agendas, etc.

Final thought as this may be an important decision point.  A few years back they came in with Paizo's help, had a big kickstarter, and came in like gangbusters trying to really penetrate the American and English-speaking market.  This game's origin is in Germany and it's apparently HUGE there.  Over the next several years they had a Magic kickstarter and Gods kickstarter and I supported everything to the hilt, buying anything and everything they translated to English to show support, etc.  Their presence and effort in the English segment has dropped off steeply over the last year.  They lost Robert Adducci who kept their online presence going pretty well as their Community Manager and whoever they replaced him with must be in the witness protection program.  All communication has evaporated.  No new kickstarters or translations have been announced (and previously they had a few queued up).  I asked the question point blank in their Discord server back on 9/21 - Do they have anything else coming out anytime soon and I've gotten crickets, even after a number of other people piped up and said, "Yeah, this!"  So if you prefer to play a game that is actively supported, I've got a bad feeling about the future of TDE.

There is enough out there in the Core Rules, Aventuria Compendium, and Magic book to play a well-rounded game, no doubt.  But I think they may be re-thinking their commitment to the English-speaking market.

Hope that helps.  I can offer nothing on WFRP 4 as I've never played it, but if you have further questions on TDE I'd be happy to help.  I've said it a couple of times but I'll repeat it once more:  my group is having a great time with it, so that's all that really matter to me.

igor

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #28 on: October 05, 2022, 12:55:46 PM »
A lot of the setting including the basic 12 gods pantheon are designed to be generic and a recognizable mirror of a real world culture/religion.
There are a bunch of others who are more unusual. Like Swafnir who is basically the antagonist of Moby Dick as a deity, Rastullah, Aventuria's version of Allah who either doesn't actually exist in the setting or operates on very different principles to the other gods, or Rur and Gror, hermaphroditical twins one of whom created the world and is in the process of giving it to the other as a gift.

ForgottenF

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Re: WFRP 4e vs. The Dark Eye 5e
« Reply #29 on: October 06, 2022, 05:13:55 PM »
So I want to stress: These are sincere questions. I'm not trying to argue the mechanic, since I haven't played it. I don't have a general fantasy game that I really love, and part of me wants TDE to be it.

I get that the three dice roll is something you can quickly adjust to, especially as I play most of my games online these days, and the VTT will probably automate that. What gives me pause is the skill point system on top of it. The scene I picture in my head is of a player rolling his three dice, and then having to stop and go "ok, I need to add 3 points to that one, 4 to this one, the leaves me with three left; now I go to the quality level table...wait what page is that...oh ok, It's quality level 1" Doesn't sound like a lot, but If the game is heavily skill based, adding 20-30 seconds to each resolved roll might be an issue.

Am I reading the rule wrong, or does that not really happen, or are skill checks maybe just not as common as I'm assuming they would be?