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Yesterday I made a short post concerning all of the crap that comes with the upcoming release of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play. The big questions on our minds are “Is this necessary? Does this complicate the game? Does this bring anything useful or exciting to the game?” The most common criticism of the game right now is that it more closely resembles a board game than a RPG. Well, there is a two-part article on FFG’s website that attempts to shed some light on their use of cards in WFRP.

The first article is all about the design philosophy of the cards. In WFRP cards are a way to represent actions. You can tell what type of action a card contains by the design on its back-side. The front of the card contains all sorts of rules that is readily available, and you don’t have to dig around through a book to find it. All these things may very well be true, but it still means that there are more physical objects required to play the game — lose any of them, and you’ll need to replace them.

Now each card is an action. Are all actions limited to cards? For the most part, yes. The card “perform a stunt” appears to be their way out of any limitations that would arise from needing a certain card, and is one of a few cards that are always available. I’m still having some difficulty imagining how such a system cannot be limiting in nature.

The cards are little more than a vehicle for quickly conveying instructions for augmenting a dice pool and moving tokens around (wounds and critical wounds are to be handled this way, it seems). There are dice pools tied to the actions, and multiple successes or failures can add white dice (which make a task easier) or black dice (which make a task more difficult) to your dice pool on relevant rolls.

One card, “Assess the Situation” (visible here in the second article), states that you must add the purple d8 to your pool while in combat. All I can gather from that is that the purple d8 is somehow tied to combat. There are other lines on the card for “side effects” which result from a certain number of “boons, banes, Sigmar’s Comet, or Chaos Star” results in the pool.

This should make resolving actions within the game a very speedy and dynamic process, and I really want to see it in action. I’m doubtful that it can justify all of the additional stuff, but we’ll see about it when the demo rolls around. Warhammer Fantasy is obviously going to be a very unorthodox RPG. It’s probably going to take off and be a success, which means that there will be expansions and expansion cards, which also means that FFG is probably onto something very lucrative here. Which is good. I want to see FFG staying in business for a long time.