Editing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (section)

== Gameplay ==

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay uses a custom-made D100 percentile system that shows a clear ancestral lineage from the system used in ''Warhammer'' for large-scale wargame combat involving dozens of miniatures at a time fighting in coherent units. This becomes apparent through several oddities in the system such as Weapon/Ballistic Skill (skill with melee and ranged weapons, respectively) being distinct from Strength and Dexterity, and a character's "quickness" is determined by ''three'' stats - Initiative, Agility and Dexterity. The system has been praised for its remarkably bug/exploit-free nature over the years.

Nearly every portion of character creation can be rolled leading to amusing tales of a peasant, a noble, a doctor, and a sailor getting together to claim a lost dwarven stronghold. Edition depending, you are allowed to choose your race, class and background but "making do" with the weirdo Ranald gives you is thematically encouraged (and mechanically as well, with bonus starting XP). WFRP does not do conventional ''D&D'' classes, instead you have a career system; PCs are likely to come from working-class backgrounds like woodsman or charcoal-burner or beggar to reflect their decidedly unheroic natures. PCs progress down career pathways to enhance their skills and equipment and are expected to jump across careers multiple times. The career system is in many ways better than the static class system employed by ''D&D'' because character progression feels a lot more organic and spontaneous and less reliant on "builds". You can start out as a lowly dock thug, become a mercenary, aim to move up to join a knightly order, but then you meet up with some dwarfs and instead learn to become a shield-breaker with them, or throw your lot in with the thieves' guild and become a burglar. Highly recommended is playing with the Career Companion (even if the book itself is rarer than pieces of the holy cross) since it adds literally hundreds of classes from all the released books, but be aware that some aspects they add (like new types of magic) are not in the book and might require some extra legwork or modulation to figure out.

Perhaps the biggest claim to fame for the system is the extreme amounts of character careers available to players. While the base game is generally rather simple (start as an apprentice, then become a shit wizard, then become an okay-ish wizard, etc.) additional books have added a shocking amount of player choice. Want to be a ratcatcher or a slave? How about a Grail Knight or a Vampire? Want to play a warp stone sniffing Skaven or champion of Nurgle? All of these are options. The best "class" is ratcatcher, as it has the most important piece of equipment in the game, a small but vicious dog; the downside to being a ratcatcher is you have to wade through waist-deep levels of shit to club vicious rats the length of your arm to death for pennies, and you can't talk about the ratmen you keep encountering down there because the people who do tend to be never heard from again (abducted either by the authorities who don't want to create a moral panic or, worse, by the ratmen themselves). Seriously, being a ratcatcher is the most thankless and pitiful job ever, you are probably the only thing standing in the way of the Empire being literally eaten and you have nothing to show for it besides a couple missing fingers.

Crippling poverty and shortage is a near-perpetual state of being for PCs, and they'll be scrambling for every penny even if they are doing well - in 2nd Edition, the most expensive item in the whole game is a Best craftsmanship galleon, worth 120,000 gold crowns in a game where having more than fifty in your purse at any moment is a big accomplishment. It practically takes the piss. Depending on what career you roll up you might not even start with a proper weapon, and you can forget starting with any armour ''at all'' unless you are supremely fortunate. You might have enough starting gold to get a decent pair of boots or a leather skullcap though, but any chainmail you get is probably rusted or moth-eaten and nabbed off a dead bandit. Guns likewise are extremely powerful but unless you roll up a soldier you are unlikely to be able to get your hands on one for a long while, and they aren't exactly accurate or reliable except for Hochland Long Rifles, which are painstakingly hand-crafted by family craftsmen in a forested region with jackshit for industry and thus you'll be lucky to ever see one in your entire career. Money is also hard to come by and difficult to work with not only because it's non-metric like old British money (a gold crown is 20 silver shillings, 1 silver shilling is 12 bronze pennies, etc.) but also because there is a good chance that you go into the next state and it is worthless because nobody recognises it (there is actually a book purely to handle exchange rates between different Old World currencies, but if you DM is nice he'll just arbitrate this).

As a consequence of the game system's wargaming background, combat is extremely (and often hilariously) lethal, and has many rules for crippling injuries and critical hits. It is fully possible for a lowly badger to bite you on the leg and cause you to lose your limb, and this turns attempting to mount a horse into a dangerous endeavour only undertaken by the most foolhardy of warriors. For the true WFRP experience however, there is an [https://www.windsofchaos.com/?page_id=19 epic compilation of expanded injury rules and tables (one document 79 pages long)] created by Josef Tham, an ER doctor who read the original injury ruleset in all its glory and all its horror and decided to ''spice it up a bit''. His rules do a brilliantly macabre job of describing the kind of damage these primitive weapons would have on human tissue. Disease is also a fact of life and something your characters will not get away from; your character can survive a tense combat with zombies only to catch a contagion from the blood splatter and perish five days later in agony after their eyes rot out. You can even get the squits by risking a "cook 'em fast, sell 'em cheap" Rumster's Special pie - which might be beef, might be rat meat, might be Rumster's business rivals, it's a pot luck. Poultices are valuable (and arguably overpowered), and anyone who can do magical healing is worth more than their weight in gold.

To offset the horrifying lethality of combat, you get Fate and Fortune points, because even starving German peasants get plot armour if they happen to be PCs. Fortune points can be spent during a game to reroll a bad roll, but are reclaimed at the end of every session. Fate points work like a 1-Up, you permanently burn a Fate point to (narrowly) survive something that would have otherwise killed you. GMs are encouraged to never give Fate points except for truly incredible feats of roleplay worthy of greentexting, and what's worse, burning a Fate point reduces your Fortune point pool.