I ran WFRP with a set group over several years.
The PC death toll by the end was north of a hundred. Even if you try to go easy of them, the nature of the system kills PCs left and right.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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I GM'd WFRP 2e a few times. In one session, a big ram that doubled as a mount for one of the players was slowly becoming a vessel for a daemon, culminating with an attack against the owner. Missed the first attack, but the second was a critical*: 27 points of damage (player characters usually have 12-14 hit points), which made it a one-hit-fatality, ripping the head clean out of the body. I kinda felt bad for the player, but the scene was just too good
* In 2e, criticals are only when rolling for damage. If the D10 comes out 10, it's a critical and you roll again, adding up. Rolling 10s again also count as critical and let you roll again.
Unless your players are complaining about their characters not dying it's probably a bad decision to kill their characters.
While killing PC for the sake of killing them is, usually, abad practice. PC need to feel the risk of dying when doing dangerous stuff. It changes the way you play, if you know that a knife can kill you. Sure your skill mean you'll most likely win the fight or one shot that kid before they move, but if they pull a knife it's not just 1d4 over your 100 HP but a potential injury or death if you don't use your skills
Players don't NEED anything.
Some players want a challenge and to feel anxious when playing tabletop games.
Some don't want the threat of their characters dying, or a stressful experience when hanging out with their friends.
Personally I want to be then one that decides when I stop playing my character that I spent hours making and flushing out, if my DM killed my character for some random bullshit dice roll i would honestly not want to play anymore.
And some players just want a chance to play another one of the many characters they made.
So make up any other reason your character has to leave instead of your DM deciding when you are done playing.
Fair enough but also that’s kind of lame.
That isn't lame, that is just a different playstyle.
It is more fun, you should try it sometime.
There's nothing wrong with running a game explicitly intended to have a chance to kill PCs, as long as everyone is aware of that ahead of time.
Hence Session Zero
Had a Warhammer game where a pc died from getting hit with a board in a bar fight. Another lost their arm to one of the first traps we encountered. Our elf ended up with an insanity that gave him a burning hatred of elves. I love that system.
Our elf ended up with an insanity that gave him a burning hatred of elves
Uncle Ruckus?
Sounds like pretty reasonable.
Actually I am surprised that there is (still) game not turning enemy unconscious upon "critical hit" or "high damage", it's both a way to make combat more dangerous and have a safety breaker to not kill a PC
Traveller does this in a sense. You don't have hit points in the traditional sense, but rather when you take damage, you apply it against one of your 3 physical attributes which are rolled on 2d6 at character generation. So every character effectively has 6d6 hit points. Your attributes are temporarily reduced while you are damaged, so getting hurt is bad! If you fully lose two of your physical attributes, you are unconscious. Three, you are dead.
A bog standard rifle does 3d6 damage, by the way. It's a sci-fi setting, so maybe it's better to mention that a laser rifle does 5d6 - 3 damage. So combat is fairly intense too!
Nah, you probably did it right. WFRP is a deadly system, which cuts both ways. PCs will win fights hard and fast, much of the time. Its just that, when the fight turns, when they get bad luck on rolls or are outnumbered/outmatched, they die hard and fast.
As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let's not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.
WFRP isn't meant to be "punishing" or "difficult" or whatever other term you want to come up with for "mean to the players." No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that's just bad GMing. You're here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that's not an accomplishment.
What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC's still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is "harder" but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.
High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that's OK. They should be able to do that, they're a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they'll never feel completely safe even though they'll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.
Can you speak on the 40k system as well? Is it worth a shot?
The 40k ones that follow on Dark Heresy all play the same way as WFRP: basic attributes with most values being a 0-100 range, lots of skills to sink points in, overall same rules for combat with similar damage and critical damage chart. Mechanically, they're all effectively the same game, changing only the kind of adventures you end up having (depressed soldiers in Only War, lawless space hijinks in Rogue Trader, spehss mareens in Deathwatch, evil corruption and worship in Black Crusade)
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I didn't even know there were multiple. One player of my group recently ordered some rulebooks for something else and they put like a starter book light in there as well. It's like 20 pages. Only War means you pay Guardsmen? That sounds great.
Yup, I also specified Dark Heresy because there's a newer, different 40k RPG, Wrath and Glory, that uses a very different set of mechanics and has an expansion for playing as Eldar. I can't speak about it, haven't taken the time to read or ever had the chance to play
No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that's just bad GMing.
Just ignoring Paranoia.
Paranoia isn't so much "mean" as it is calling your best friend "fuckface" in front of his mom.
Calling the perfect game mean is an act of treason. Please proceed to the nearest Traitor-B-Gone tube for correction.
This sounds like a blast
Its an amazing system if you want your games to feel less like Skyrim and more like Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
But, y'know, with magic and horrifying chaos monstrosities.
Honestly that sounds about right for WFRP. Shouldnt take too many sessions for the dice to do similar to a player instead.