Warhammer FRP 2nd Edition: What D&D 3.x Should Have Been

I'm enjoying running my Warhammer FRP PBEM game. Proceedings have been amusingly chaotic and the party members have an interesting tendency to attack everything on sight, which should prove entertaining in the long term.

I'm also enjoying the system, which is rare for me - generally speaking my philosophy on system is "Who gives a shit so long as you have motivated players and good characters, and we're not playing Blue Rose?" But WFRP really scratches that itch I have for realistic, gritty, low-fantasy nastiness, plus mutants, chaos gods and unreliable firearms.

The best thing about WFRP is the combat, which is both tactically fun but also pretty authentic in feel - the characters seem fragile in the same way that real people are fragile, and armour and shields are often the difference between life and death. It's a far cry from the weird D&D world of hit points, armour class and abstract mechanics - which is part of the charm, of course, but just not a proper fit for so many styles of gaming.

What interests me most about WFRP is that the combat is at least broadly similar to D&D 3.x's - everything is based on full and half actions, swift actions, free actions, etc. - but the difference is that WFRP's system just works, whereas I never felt D&D 3.x's did. Attacks of Opportunity were always annoying and fiddly; grappling and unarmed combat generally was a mess. Worse, the obsession with the tactical minutiae of combat never sat right with the level of abstraction at which the traditional mechanics existed - combat itself was exceptionally detailed tactically, but at the point at which hits and damage (the meat and bones) came into play, it suddenly morphed into something very simplistic. By contrast, WFRP combat is always at the same level of abstraction and the same level of detail, whether you're working out what actions exactly your character can do this round, or working out where he's been hurt and how badly. More importantly, its combat isn't likely to be ruined by overly powerful magic-users doing everything, or by killer class-combination "builds" dreamed up by annoying adolescent boys with nothing better to do with their time and posted on the internet.

WFRP's system is so robust and fun, in fact, that I think it would work perfectly for historical gaming, especially around the period which the Warhammer world is roughly analagous to. I can just imagine a game set in the Italian Wars, or during the Conquest of Mexico, or during the zenith of the Ottoman Empire. The fall of Byzantium, perhaps.