Editing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (section)

=== Second Edition ===
Published by Green Ronin in 2004, Second Edition mostly built on the first.  It faced the unenviable job of matching the increasingly high fantasy bent world the tabletop game was building with the low power feel of the first editions, not always gracefully but in general it managed.  It was notable for adding a number of new careers, including the aforementioned Chaos Champion, Grail Knight, and Vampire paths.  The flaws of second edition mostly came down to the era when it was released, where companies were pumping out books quicker and quicker, often with high railroading, which can lead to problems in a system where combat is so lethal. Still, the books for Bretonia, Norsca, Kislev and the Border Princes are generally considered high marks, and you can always play the old modules with the new ruleset. Also the Skaven book, which in addition to letting you play as Skaven in campaigns, also gave some of the most in-depth background to the teeming little ratmen in existence and is a good read for anyone interested their fluff.

The second edition divided the ridiculous large amount of skills into actual skills and talents. Skills existed as Basic Skills, i.e: skills that any character could roll for, even without being trained in the skill, but with a penalty of halving the Characteristic and rounding up, and as Advanced Skills which required the training, no matter what. Talents were in turn, for the most part, advantages that influenced the use of Skills, Characteristics or Actions, either at all times or under special circumstances.

Another thing that the second edition has sorted out positively were Skill Groups by making use of categorization. Skill Groups refered to skills that consisted of "sub-skills", but where each sub-skill counts as a standalone Skill that had to be learned in order to be used without any penalties. Examples of Skill Groups were skills like Common Knowledge: Land X and Common Knowledge: Land Y. Both skills belong to the Common Knowledge skill group but are actually two standalone skills. While not a change in the mechanic itself, the way this is presented in the Corebook allowed both the GM and the players to see through how the system has been built without being overwhelmed by a clusterfuck of 100+ uncategorized skills, like in the first edition. The same method has been applied to Talents, i.e: Talent Groups.

While 1E made use of the standard set of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10 etc) of other popular Roleplaying Games, the second edition made use of two d10 exclusively, incorporating D% in Characteristic and Skill tests, and 1 or 2d10 for damage rolls.