Was this thing as bad as people make it out to be?

>>95955092 (OP)
It wasn't that bad, but it was very different. Seen as its own game it's fine, but it wasn't great as a replacement for WFRP 2e.

>>95955092 (OP)
It's a boardgame, not an RPG.
You have to buy/own a lot of shit to play.

>>95955092 (OP)
It is probably the best WHRPG out there but it absolutely earned the hate it got from how badly Fantasy Flight butchered it's staggered release of core WH mechanics, batshit pricing model, and more.
Final product? All the books and bits and bobs? It's pretty fucking stellar but it was a massive shit show getting there. A lot of hate is mainly geared toward the game because you kind needed the cards to play it effectively (the batshit amount of things that can happen when performing an action being readily available information was pretty important) and that made the impossible to pirate or run with just PDFs. The dice were a hurdle for piratefags too.

Good game, shit handling, pissed off broke players, and the result is something people scorn to this day.

>>95955122
The three CRB they released at the end really cleaned up the layout and reference sections, so it wasn't that bad.
The cards weren't absolutely needed but they helped immensely.
The bigger problem is the dice will never be made again.

>>95955092 (OP)
The original core set was, if I recall correctly, retailing for 95 dollars. It was kind of doomed no matter how quality it was.

>>95955142
>The bigger problem is the dice will never be made again.

It's trivial to "convert" dice, and they still manufacture d6, d8, and d10.

Hell, you can buy blank dice and either write your own sides or print off stickers and cut them to fit.

>>95955092 (OP)
This guy >>95955129 pretty much summed up my feelings too.
My group hated it, coming from 2e, but I could see some hidden genius in there, a genuine evolution of 40 year old game mechanics.
Its failure scared FFG off so badly that they never experimented with the Warhammer franchise again (and later lost the license anyway).

>>95955291
I never tried it, but I've had players who told me it was great. More heroic action adventures than the ratcatcher detective shit we're used to from 2e though.

What does it play like? Why do you need special dice and cards?

>>95955374
>Why do you need special dice and cards?
It was one of the earliest attempts at introducing elements of CCGs and Boardgames.
So instead of having say, an index of Spells, you'd have a deck of Spell Cards. If your PC had the spell Fireball, you'd just have that card in your hands with all the rules and effects on it. Same deal for a Sword, or a Shield, or anything really.
In addition, things like Conditions (Poisoned, Stunned etc) were on cards, so were Insanity, Miscasts, Wounds - pretty much all the player-facing rules could be found on these cards. As the GM you'd just hand them a Wound Card or whatever.
Player Characters also had access to a 5-step Stance meter of sorts, rated from Green (Defensive) to Red (Reckless). Your Class (Career) sets what kind of Stance you're typically in, which confers specific bonuses or penalties to your actions. Something like a Dwarf Slayer is typically full Reckless and benefits thusly.
>What does it play like?
I found it flowed extremely well - PCs feel effective at what they're good at, it was faster than most other games of similar complexity, art was super gorgeous. However set up was clunky as fuck, and took up a lot of space. It was also optimised for 3 players only (you had a limited number of cards), which severely hamstrung the game in the long run as others have pointed out.

>>95955092 (OP)
No. It's an identical phenomenon to the D&D 4e hysteria.

>>95955374
>Why did you need special dice?
Because straight up pass and fail from rolls were incredibly rare affairs. You go to hit a bitch? Depending on what you rolled dictates how you hit said bitch. You got three successes so you dealt your weapon's damage, but with three successes that particular weapon disarms the enemy. You also rolled some setbacks that open you up for enemy attacks this round and you took some physical strain.

Putting that altogether? Your character buried his axe into the enemies shoulder making him drop his sword, but the axe is stuck in his muscles preventing you from freeing it this turn as he flails against you striking some feeble body blows distracting you from his buddies who see you wide open for slicing and dicing.

That's how narrative dice work. They dictate a world state and the GM fluffs it up to have it make sense. WH was the first narrative dice RPG that FFG made.

>Why the cards?
Every SINGLE action, spell, weapon, and skill had an array of outcomes including special flavors of miscast effects depending on what those dice rolled. So instead of flipping through a book or writing a paragraph for everything your character has access to, just hand the player a card that sums it all up for the ease of everyone at the table.
Wound cards tracked damage when face down like hp, however, a critical wound is face up and has some kind of debilitation attached to it. Critical wounds were a mother fucker to treat. Mutations could be minor (cat slit pupils) to growing extra limbs depending on the draw. Miscasts also got really wacky with effects. You kept those cards handy so you didn't forget about them. Illnesses were gnarly too.

The BIGGEST reason you used cards? So you didn't have to write all that shit down and knew what your character could do and the state they were in at a glance. Everyone at the table knew at a glance and it saved in a lot of book keeping.

>>95955129
>you kind needed the cards to play it effectively and that made the impossible to pirate
nigger what? Have printers and card sleeves suddenly disappeared?
I understand griping about dice since it's a bit of a hassle to make good-looking dice without unbalanced 3dpd shit or the like, but cards? seriously?

>>95955188
They hadn't figured out the narrative dice system yet and RAW you never removed dice from any check you only added dice. The designers were of the opinion that it was more fun to roll more dice and the dice pool could get comically large (talking 16 dice deep) and that slowed up game progress a lot.

Genesys really is the best use of the narrative dice system but given how they didn't use THAT for Lot5R or Arkham Horror, it seems like they are just abandoning it now.
Well, it's a pretty fleshed out system with sourcebooks for fantasy, cyberpunk/sci-fi, Space Opera, and whatever the fuck Keyforge is, so it's not a total wash. If they ever released a horror and supers splat, I'd call it "complete".
Lot5R and AH have objectively worse systems. AH is just outright a shit system but they were trying to move away from proprietary dice there.

>>95955753
Do they even have the card in a printable format?

>>95955753
It genuinely took years before someone put the cards up for piracy

>>95955796
Not that I've ever found. I think some armor and weapon card as well as monster fan made stuff is out there.
No spells, wounds, diseases, miscasts, mutations, party sheets, actions, skills, and such though.

The party sheets were a great tool that other games should used. The more you acted how your particular flavor of party was supposed to act, the more rewards you got. The less you acted like your party should, the more you got hosed.

>>95955836
Someone did?
I'm impressed. That is a shitload of cards with a bunch of different sized and they will rape your ink supply too.