Built from Birth is a series on lifepath systems in tabletop RPGs through history. In each post I walk through the lifepath process for a given system and reflect on the experience.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is the tabletop RPG built on th enduringly-popular Warhammer miniatures wargame. I don’t get the sense that the RPG was ever very financially successful in comparison, but its “career” system is another pretty early example of lifepaths in RPGs. Subsequent editions past the initial publication seem to have messed with this system, so this week, I’m looking at the First Edition of WFRP from 1986.
Cracking it Open
Warhammer is totally new to me. I’ve gained some familiarity through osmosis, but mostly on the 40k side of things, so I was expecting something a bit weirder than I found in the WFRP rulebook.
Instead, I learned that WFRP, at least in the First Edition, imports almost all the basic assumptions of D&D. There’s alignment, essentialist fantasy “races,” Halflings, and so on. It also seems to import all of the issues that come with D&D and Tolkienian fantasy. These are real concerns, but they’ve been talked through extensively. I didn’t find anything beyond the pale in my time with WFRP, so I won’t be nitpicking alignment philosophy or dissecting fantasy racism in this post.
The lifepath system in WFRP is represented by a character’s “careers.” These include situations of actual employment, but also more general ways to devote one’s life (e.g. the Agitator or the Demagogue). Character creation is brief, with only a single career per character at the start of a campaign. However, WFRP has characters continue their career paths between adventures, so to get a full sense of the system I might need to go beyond character creation.
Starting Character Creation
Step 1 – Basic Information
In this first step, we choose our character’s race, which will help determine the rest of their stats. For easier reference, I’m also going to pick a name and pronouns at this step.
WFRP recommends making a Human for your first character, so I’ll make a Human named Astrid. Like all Human PCs, she has Neutral alignment, no Night Vision, and speaks the common language of Old Worlder. I roll her height to be 5’8″.
For age, the game provides two different rolls for each race, one skewing younger and one older. I choose the older roll, but still roll fairly low, making Astrid’s age 29.
The system also has a mechanic called Fate points, which represent an adventurer’s greater destiny. In practice, these are a finite resource a character can use to avoid certain death. Each race has a different roll to determine Fate points, with Humans advantaged to represent that “Humanity is in the ascendant and the other races are on the wane.” I roll the Human maximum of 4 for Astrid.
Step 2 – Character Profile
WFRP has a truly overwhelming number of characteristics, together called a “character profile.” Briefly, they are:
- Movement (M): how fast a character can cover ground
- Weapon Skill (WS): success chance when melee fighting
- Ballistic Skill (BS): success chance for a ranged attack
- Strength (S): physical power and combat damage
- Toughness (T): ability to resist taking damage
- Wounds (W): amount of damage a character can take before being seriously injured or killed
- Initiative (I): quick thinking, determines combat order
- Attacks (A): number of attacks per round, usually 1
- Dexterity (Dex): fine motor control and skill using hands
- Leadership (Ld): ability to lead others and inspire loyalty
- Intelligence (Int): ability to “think and understand”
- Cool (Cl): ability to stay calm and collected under stress
- Will Power (WP): resistance to mental and magical manipulation
- Fellowship (Fel): social skills, appearance, empathy, etc.
Typical values for each of these vary by race, and the game provides a table of rolls for each characteristic and race:
For Astrid, I roll the following starting profile:
| M | WS | BS | S | T | W | I | A | Dex | Ld | Int | Cl | WP | Fel |
| 3 | 26 | 38 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 29 | 1 | 34 | 29 | 29 | 31 | 36 | 23 |
Astrid is average in a lot of ways. She’s not the fastest character or the best melee fighter, but she’s strong, tough, willful, and dexterous for a Human. Notably, she’s excellent with ranged weapons, having almost the highest possible starting BS for Humans.
Step 3 – Class
There are four broad classes in WFRP, containing more specific careers. Three are pretty standard to fantasy RPGs: Warrior, Ranger, and Rogue. The fourth, Academic, covers magic-users like Wizards and Clerics, but also skilled craftspeople, artisans, and educated professionals.
Each class has a requirement based on one or two starting characteristics. Warriors must have 30+ Weapon Skill, while Rangers need 30+ Ballistic Skill. Rogues require 30+ Initiative, or 65+ for (naturally-Good) Elves. The strictest requirement is for Academics, who need scores of 30+ in both Intelligence and Will Power.
Astrid meets the Will Power threshold to be an Academic, but barely misses the Intelligence requirement. She doesn’t have the Weapon Skill or Initiative to be a Warrior or Rogue. But her excellent starting Ballistic Skill makes her a natural fit for the Ranger class anyway.
Each class has default possessions, which the game calls Trappings. As a Ranger, Astrid wears good clothing, worn and stained from travel and use. She carries a leather bag with three blankets, cutlery, a tinderbox, and a small cooking pot. For defense and utility, she has a sword and a small knife, and her purse contains 11 Gold Crowns.
Step 4 – Starting Skills
Player characters receive certain skills based on their race and class. The number of skills is based on a d4 roll, but is modified based on age; young and very old characters have mastery over fewer skills than characters “in their prime.”
As a Human at 29 years old, Astrid gets a d4+1 skills, and I roll a 3. Non-Humans must use their first two points on specific racial skills, but Humans skip this. For any remaining points, skills are determined from a table based on the character’s class. For example, Astrid’s skills will come from three rolls on the Ranger table:
I roll Drive Cart, Scale Sheer Surface, and Very Resilient for Astrid. The first two allow Astrid to do the specified action without a dice roll in most situations. Very Resilient, however, modifies Astrid’s base profile with +1 Toughness.
Step 5 – Starting Career
Each character starts with a “basic” career from a class-specific pool. This starting career captures the character’s life prior to becoming an adventurer, conferring appropriate skills and characteristic boosts. A character might keep working this career between adventures, or they might immediately choose a different day job.
Players can guide a PC’s career advancement later on, but a character’s starting career is randomly determined from a table based on class and race:
For Astrid, I roll the starting career of Trapper. This career entails capturing animals for their furs, with a specific focus on using traps to preserve the condition of pelts rather than hunting with a bow.
As a Trapper, Astrid gets a host of new Skills and Trappings; a character automatically receives these from their starting career. She’s also well-positioned to move into other classes, with exits to the careers of Druid, Outlaw, and Scout. More on career exits after character creation is finished
Step 6 – Advance Scheme
Aside from Skills and Trappings, a career also provides a specific “advance scheme.” As seen in the picture above, this is a copy of the character profile with +X modifiers listed for certain characteristics. These represent the maximum benefit attainable through the current career.
| M | WS | BS | S | T | W | I | A | Dex | Ld | Int | Cl | WP | Fel |
| +10 | +10 | +1 | +2 | +10 | +10 |
One way experience points can be spent throughout a campaign is to buy advances within the advance scheme. Each advance adds 10 points to a percentile characteristic or 1 point to a characteristic like Strength or Toughness. So the Trapper career allows advances which would raise a character’s WS, BS, I, or Dex to 10 points higher than their starting profile, for example. The +2 value for W in the Trapper’s advance scheme means W can be advanced twice, each time adding 1.
This isn’t relevant during character creation, but multiple careers’ advance schemes are not cumulative. If Astrid takes both Wounds advances from Trapper and wants to get more points in Wounds, she’ll need to find a career with a +3 or higher in the Wounds advance scheme. But if she only takes one Wounds advance before changing to another career with a +2 in the scheme, she can take the second one there with no problem.
All we need to do for now is note the advance scheme on our character sheet, and take the free character creation advance. I want Astrid to be a bit quicker on the draw, so I take the Initiative advance, upping her I to 39. This completes character creation for Astrid:
More Characters
Creating Astrid was pretty quick, so I decide to run through a full party. I end up making five more characters:
Abidemi (he/him)
An Elf Academic with an Herbalist career.
Zola (they/them)
A Human Academic with a Physician’s Student career.
Larisa (she/her)
A Dwarf Warrior with a Servant career.
Greig (he/him)
A Human Warrior with a Laborer career.
Jesse (they/them)
A Halfling Rogue with an Entertainer (Comic) career.
A Simulated Campaign
Character creation really only covers a part of WFRP’s career system. Characters are expected to keep a career between adventures. While not strictly mandatory, the career system is the only way to spend XP. I’m going to run the party I created above through a ten-session simulated campaign to more fully test the WFRP’s take on lifepaths.
The XP Economy
Players earn XP for accomplishing objectives in-game and for good roleplaying, so XP can very between players and sessions. The GM section of the rules says that players should generally be earning 100-300 XP per session, with a 150 XP session being quite good.
That XP can then be spent on advances and career changes between sessions. The options are:
- Increase a characteristic within the current advance scheme – 100 XP
- Gain a new skill – 100 XP, applies if
- The character failed a % chance to learn the skill during character creation
- It’s a skill from a non-starting career, which must always be bought this way
- The skill isn’t available from the current career, but the character is actively working to learn it and passes any rolls set by the GM
- Change careers to a listed exit of the current career – 100 XP
- Change to a basic career within a character’s class – 100 XP
- Change to a basic career within a different class – 200 XP
- Learn a new spell – 50-200 XP
Changing careers is also subject to GM judgment; they might require a roll for hiring, and they have final say on whether a given career is available in the setting and circumstances.
Simplifications
Since I’m not running actual adventuring sessions, this clearly won’t be a perfect simulation of a real campaign. Some other guidelines I’ll use to simplify:
- Each character earns exactly 100 XP per session
- Characters cannot die
- Players don’t take non-career skills
- Every career is available within the fiction
- Characters won’t learn spells
This means that (barring a class change), each character can advance, learn a skill, or change careers every session.
I’m also not going to track the characters’ Trappings going forward, because it’s a lot of work and doesn’t add much.
Character Growth
I’ll summarize each character separately rather than going week-by-week for the whole party. The minutiae I’m skipping is almost entirely the order advances are taken.
Astrid
Trapper is a pretty good starting career. Astrid was able to keep up the trade over several adventures, becoming stronger and improving her bowmanship. But killing animals to keep rich folks in furs takes a toll, and soon it was time for a change.
Astrid’s name didn’t appear under OUTLAW on the Wanted posters; the nobles and merchants she’d once sold to must have forgotten her entirely. She knew her forest well, including all the places where travelers could be waylaid. A few well-placed arrows swiftly parted coin from carrier, and a share of the take to the local commoners kept her out of jail.
At the end of the campaign, Astrid had semi-retired from her life of crime. There was good enough money to be made at archery tourneys for a skilled Targeteer with plenty of practical experience.
Abidemi
With little left to learn from Herbalism, Abidemi was ready for a career change early. He settled on Druid, adopting the tenets and lifestyle demanded by the Old Faith. He aspired to someday become a Druidic Priest and have access to spells, but that required a long period of focus and commitment.
Between adventures, Abidemi deepened his relationship to nature, learned the Secret Signs of the Old Faith, and generally improved himself through devotion. By the end of the campaign, he felt he had reached a pivotal moment.
After his next adventure, he would seclude himself in nature for a week of fasting and meditation. This would determine once and for all if the Gods had called him to be a full Druidic Priest, or if he might need to find another path.
Zola
After their first adventure, Zola found little motivation to return to their studies. Sure, they couldn’t exactly Heal Wounds or Treat Diseases yet. But they knew how to make medicines, and they also knew how to make them incorrectly (some would call these “poisons”). Acquiring the customary black bag, they declared themselves Zola the Physician.
Relatively few places welcome a young, self-appointed Physician to practice, but folks without much don’t ask many questions if the care is good. In the poorer parts of the city, Zola learned hands-on how to treat wounds and diseases, even picking up Surgery.
They spent the rest of the campaign deepening those skills; a dedicated medic with decent bedside manner can be quite an asset to a group of adventurers.
Larisa
As soon as word of her first adventure reached home, Larisa was summoned to support Dwarven civilization against the Goblin hordes as a Tunnel Fighter. As good a place as any to develop her skills, she learned to fight and navigate strange caverns as second nature.
However, the tunnels could only teach so much. Midway through the campaign she struck out on her own as a Troll Slayer, determined to hone her skills one-on-one against the most challenging enemies around. She thought someday, if she survived long enough, she’d move up to giants.
Greig
A blue-collar dude with few exceptional traits, Greig’s career options were limited. He found work as a Bodyguard, which allowed him to develop his fighting skills substantially. When that started to get stale, he set his eyes on the best fighters he could think of: the Judicial Champions who would fight in trial by combat on others’ behalf.
He did a brief stint as a Pit Fighter, really just to make the right connections and win some name recognition. By the end of the campaign, he was established as the world’s first sliding-scale Judicial Champion, scraping together a living out of what the wrongly-accused could afford to pay.
Jesse
After experiencing a taste of life outside the city, all Jesse could see when they returned was the profound injustice of it all. They did one more round as a Comic in the taverns of the city, but their jokes turned acerbic and dangerously polarizing.
They found their new calling as a Demagogue, speaking truth to power and rallying the city’s lower classes against inequality and oppression. Jesse learned a bit about throwing actual bricks and stones, but mostly they developed their communication and social skills. By the end of the campaign, they always had a comrade to call on and a stack of leaflets at the ready.
Reflections
I had a good time with this system. Despite the huge number of characteristics and some points of ambiguity in the rules, it wasn’t too difficult to navigate. Spread out over a campaign, I could see it providing a lot of fun inflection points for players, and I’d probably bring in Apocalypse World-style “love letters” related to career scenarios in downtime if I were to actually run this game.
The individual careers provided a good breadth of social positions. A lot of them are military, which I wasn’t really interested in, but I didn’t need to engage those at all. Clearly, I was drawn to the anti-establishment options, and early on I decided that the hypothetical playgroup generally wanted to be fighting the power in their own ways. I didn’t feel like I struggled to find differentiation, even for characters with similar arcs.
The timing of transitions between careers did feel a little odd. Some careers require that you fully complete a prerequisite career, e.g. to become a Druid Priest you must fully complete the Druid career. That takes a long time, and wasn’t achievable with 1000 XP for Abidemi. This stands in stark contrast to other career paths, where you can take an exit (even to an “advanced career”) at any time. I suppose it makes those careers with strong prerequisite feel more special, but it seems odd when as far as I could tell, there was no rules reason Zola couldn’t immediately name themselves a Physician.
In general, I found I was not very incentivized to take advances in a character’s current career, unless that advance wasn’t present in the next career I was eyeing. Maybe this would be different with actual play, where improving stats to reduce failures would be more of a motivator. Or perhaps the expectation is for the GM to provide more obstacles to career change, encouraging people to take more advances in their current career. As it was, I didn’t see a good reason not to rush an interesting advanced career for a character and only then start taking skills and stat boosts.
What Can We Steal?
The first career being random for each character, with free choice thereafter, distinguishes social mobility between regular folks and adventurers. I don’t think it would be right for every lifepath system, and I generally err on the side of giving players more narrative authority about backstory. That said, for some systems (like the lifepath funnel I described in the Traveller post), it might be a good fit. And providing a mechanism for random starts in any lifepath system might help some players find inspiration.
The way careers interact with characteristics is also fascinating. Each career has a potential effect on you, but only by spending time in a career do you see those changes. It’s possible to join a career with nothing to teach you, and you might do so purely for an exit to another career. But unlike Burning Wheel or Traveller, none of this is firmly grounded in game time, only in XP. That provides flexibility, but might also create inconsistency or a “floaty” feeling compared to more grounded lifepath systems.
In general, I’m interested in seeing more systems that continue lifepaths through downtime. PCs as literal weekend warriors gestures to a kind of refreshing serialized storytelling, as opposed to big continuous narrative arcs. Again, not right for every game or every campaign, but even in a “story-heavy” game there should be room for a variety of pacing / tone options.
What’s Next?
Next week, I’ll be taking a look at Jennell Jaquays’s 1988 supplement Central Casting: Heroes of Legend. I’m not sure how much material that will be, so I may do Jaquays’s other Heroes supplements as well, or I might hold onto them for later.