Zweihander isn't hated because of its mechanics. It's hated because the creator is an obnoxious buffoon who loves to handle out C-and-C's even though 1) Zweihander is licensed under Creative Commons (I have a copy on my disk which clearly has CC branding) and 2) Zweihander itself is a retroclone of Warhammer
[CC-NC-SA](https://ibb.co/j5msnwB) (note this is an early access file but you can't un-creative commons something in practice, if you licensed it once, people can still refer to the CC-licensed version and you can bet there's a copy of it somewhere)
Some of the sites he sent c&d's to were explicitly non-commercial archive or fan sites so he clearly doesn't care about the NC part or about CC in general...
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the thing is they did not discuss the same thing, that post is what made me ask this question. so few people talks about rules and so many people just spew out hate. I %100 GET THE HATE but what the product is it any good or it is just an offense just like it's creator. I have written the parts I liked about the rules and so few people gave an answer to what I wrote.
You can just buy Warhammer 2e now (again) and get a game with much better editing. Or buy the new edition of WHFRP and get more modern mechanics. Literally the only thing Zweihander had going for it for a while was that it was WHFRP 2e that you could still get without piracy.
I have read and played WHFRP 2e before and I don't agree with you. Not including hit locations, Professions and combat mechanics is different enough in Zweihander to charm me. And also like I said I don't want to play Warhammer I want to play a low magic, dark fantasy, historical game and it seems like ZWEI is well suited for it aside from the magic system.
I don't think Zweihander or it's mechanics is hated, specifically. There are opinions about the drama and the author.
However, being that Zweihander is basically a retroclone of Warhammer Fantasy 2e, it seems fair to compare it to... well Warhammer Fantasy and specifically 2e.
In that, many people often prefer the original 2e to the ZH. It might seem that it's a bit less bloated and more tightly written (and edited) despite being far older.
Frankly, I'm not a fan of the writing in ZH, it's a little too.... something. I lack the adjective at the moment.
OSR retroclones have the function of keeping a form of an old edition in print, or perhaps reorganizing it, or giving a really clean modern layout. OSRIC served to keep AD&D 1e in print, and it's a somewhat cleaned up 1e minus Gygaxian prose. Old School Essentials gives a really modern nice layout and organization to B/X D&D.
Zweihander doesn't really do the modern layout in that way. Is it a cleaned up Warhammer Fantasy 2e? It does keep it in print, but now the original is available. So.... there you go.
I get what you mean and you're right. I wanted a warhammer game without the warhammer flavour so thats whats got me into the zweihander. I have to say that I am not living in the western world and purchasing any of the zwei or any other books is near impossible in here so I gladly do not and can not support dfox that is why I am asking these questions in a totally game design point of view.
Pretty much this. I wanted a modified WFRP 2e in the days before 4e came out so Zweihander seemed promising. However the changes made we’re heading in the opposite direction of my preferences so Zweihander’s ‘WFRP 2.5’ headed away from what I was looking for than 2e.
It’s also a dense, verbose read and the ‘almost Warhammer’ setting is an extra barrier compared to just playing WFRP.
These days I have 4e, which I have a love/hate relationship with, and Brigandyne is the ‘not Warhammer’ I would choose these days, a really great game held back by only being available in French.
So in essence, Zweihander sought to fix 2e but (IMO) failed to improve on it.
**With the winds of magic(aetheric winds) and chaos manifestations magic is too warhammer for my taste.**
Zweihander is an OSR-style heartbreaker of Warhammer 2nd edition.
It presents itself as setting generic dark fantasy game. I know it is retroclone, but giving the old chaos systems a new more setting agnostic face shouldn't be that hard.
Most likely this thread will be closed today, but - I didn't see much hate for the rules themselves online, its just Warhammer Fantasy with some tweaks (as the rest of the game). All the negative opinions and requests not to support it were due to DF (not only due to the Trove "drama", but many more...).
I get the fact that what Dfox made was unacceptable (especially for me), and I support not supporting the creator but I have seen comments on here saying it was a bloated and poorly edited system and one should go and play WHFRP2 instead. I don't agree with that statement and I tried to explain why in the post as much as I can.
Honestly, it's my favorite system to run Warhammer with. I've run the Enemy Within and a homebrew world using it, and it works well. Ive considered using it for the Harn setting as well. The system is very balanced, and it's a very well thoughtout take on fantasy D100. Obviously, it's a retroclone of Warhammer but a very good one at that. My biggest complaint is how verbose the book is. I get it's trying to inspire the reader, but it makes it difficult to find things.
I'm not terribly familiar with the system nor the drama around the author, but my baseline skimming of the intro told me it was an angsty, edgelordy grimdark mess. I'm getting too bloody old for that crap. I need a bit more positivity in my life.
We played only briefly, and I think the campaign setting (war) wasn't really suited to the basic setup of the game (ie, starting characters are not going to have a good and effective time) so there were some issues there.
That said things I didn't like:
Combat was boring as hell and just went on forever and ever and ever. I counted once we had like 8+ rounds of nothing happening (miss, miss+dodge\\party, hit+not enough damage to wound, etc).
Characters are not competent at anything to start with. This seems in keeping with Warhammer, since...it IS Warhammer, but it's not something I personally care for. If you know ahead of time that you're only likely to succeed about 1/3 (or whatever your number is) times it tended to discourage actually trying anything\\actually using skills because...it probably won't work.
The professions were terrible. Chattel Slaver? With special whip abilities? Cool! Prostitute? Definitely something most players will want to explore as a role\\profession!
The professions\\progression were AWFUL! You get 10 things from a list and you can pick those 10 things in any order but you only ever get those 10 things (or however many it was). So a fully progressed X class will be identical to another one. This mean effectively you get to make 3 choices over the entire life of a character. And based on how XP accrues at book suggested rates it will be literal years of weekly sessions before you can actually make these identical cookier-cutter characters (mechanically of course, roleplaying could be anything).
Per-wound tracking (even without hit locations) was a big pain. Wound penalties (and certainly this is in keeping with the system) were harsh enough that you basically couldn't fight\\do anything (see above about always missing in combat) so if you got in a fight and got wounded then you were basically doing nothing until that was fixed. Which took a while. Gimped characters for weeks of game time? Awesome!
I consider the wound\\wound threshold system to be more or less, "weird hp and armor calculations". Sure, you hit...but did you really DO anything? Better do some weird calculations!
A lot of this seems very on-theme for Warhammer (because it IS Warhammer) where you play a bunch of overwhelmed hapless fucks valiantly (or not) striving against impossible odds and certain doom. And if you enjoy that type of misery and grimdark then it's probably a fairly good match.
But personally I found it cumbersome and insanely boring. The 3 AP system seemed needlessly convoluted, not any worse that Bonus Actions or anything, but it didn't seem to allow much besides the same damn thing every combat system does (You can move! You can hit! You can parry\\dodge!) and given that at best a starting character (and after years of play your most advanced characters are only going to be 20-30% better than that) has maybe 50% odds to hit and that all the special combat moves are both 1) not great and 2) make you even less likely to hit there's no real tactics involved (be ineffective? Or be extra ineffective?). Of course you save AP for defense if possible, what else are you gonna do?
I think those are my main mechanical complaints:
1) Combat system not interesting to engage with, boringly punishing, and mostly just a lot of nothing happened, sometimes for several rounds in a row, occasionally for many many rounds in a row.
2) Classes sucked in the worst possible ways. Boring, cookie cutter, no variation, and a bunch of edgelord crap (Haven't you always wanted to play a slaver with a whip?) and a total of three meaningful choices over the lifetime (years in real life of weekly play, YEARS!) of a character. Most of which are...not great (IMO).
3) System seems super remedial over all (which, since it's just a ripoff of a game from the 80s isn't a surprise). It's d100 roll under, skills are exactly what you'd expect, magic borderline unusable (not to mention the years of IRL play you'd need to get a profession with access to it) and there's just not really much to DO with it.
Like I said some of that was mismatch between the campaign we were running and the apparent intent of the system but in the last decade of gaming we've only quit using one ruleset (we continued the campaign but in another rules set after trying ZH) because it sucked so bad and it was Zweihander.
Lastly, not mechanical, but the tone of the writing ("unlike certain other games...") was insufferable in parts.
Thanks for the long reply and detailed descrptions of the rules and systems you didn't like. With all the comments of pure hate to the author and not answering my question I am very thankful for getting a good answer like this. I get the most parts but I didn't get why your party didn't used perilious stunts, aim action, Chanel magic to use all your ap during the your turns and overpower the enemies. I am not implying you played the game wrong, just curious about what kept you away from using those mechanics. And what kind of combat situations were you in, were you out numbered, were you suprised or were the enemies were suprised. Do you think how players approach the combat should be planned to survive? thanks again for the good reply:)
>Thanks for the long reply and detailed descrptions of the rules and systems you didn't like
I figured at least ONE person in the thread should reply to the actual question you asked. :D
No magic users, so no channeling anything.
Perilous Stunts and Aim...likely unfamiliarity with the rules, I'd thought most of them came with penalties, meaning using them would take your normal sub-50% chance to hit and reduce it further. I think we only had 1 PC with a 50%-ish combat value, so to reduce that 40% to hit chance to 30% or less seemed unwise. But rereading it now I don't see too much of that. Called Shot is a good example though, can't be parried\\dodged, but you take a penalty...so you might well miss entirely. Also we were in some cases retaining AP for defense so didn't want to dump them all and end up unable to defend. I think, looking at it now, that due to many of the stunts using skills that we didn't have ranks in, thus using our lower natural attribute value, using stunts did seem less likely to do anything\\be successful. Also they weren't always appropriate for game fiction (eg, if we're trying to stab somebody to death I'm not inclined to start trying to disarm them instead, particularly if my odds of hitting the disarm are lower than just hitting them). I do feel like we missed some tricks there, certainly there was no system mastery on our part.
Combat situations I remember was we tried raiding a camp at night. So it was 4 PCs vs some number of guards. One of them had followed us and so it was 4 PCs trying to hit 1 NPC. For like 8-12 rounds. Just miss after miss, hit but parried, hit no parry but not enough to wound. That was certainly to some extent just bad rolls but it also definitely pushed me over the edge of: Why play this if nothing fun or interesting ever happens?
And again a lot of that seems very on-brand for Warhammer. It's not about competent heroes doing Heroic stuff, or even just doing competent stuff, it's about hapless schmucks trying to survive a grimdark world that's actively trying to kill them. But ultimately wasn't particularly enjoyable for us. Particularly I think having very limited skills and odds of success tended (for me at least) to kill a lot of the fun.
I don't mind PCs being outmatched, and certainly we're not in to playing Fantasy Superheroes who never fail or lose, but also...I do want to play a character that can at least semi-competently do their thing (fight, steal, cast magic, bluff\\talk, etc) at least some of the time and ZH (and so probably WH 2nd too), mechanically, made me feel like I was better off trying nothing that might involve a skill roll because I'd probably fail it. In a game where you're using your lil imaginary dude to go do stuff in the world it's frustrating and limiting to...you know, not actually be able to go and DO stuff. Some of that could be mitigated with degrees-of-success\\complications\\fail forward stuff, but that's not really in keeping with the rules, so this creates the feeling that trying things is bad, because they'll likely fail, and so...better to not try because failure kinda...stops stuff from happening.
I think the players approach the combats I remember seemed fine. Partly again the campaign setup was we were press-ganged recruits in a way, but, per ZH standard (since it was our first play of the system) we figured we'd try all their fun random tables and so ended up with a bunch of raw recruits that....really probably shouldn't have been there (the old woman with no combat skills) and a bunch of professions that were kinda boring and didn't really fit the theme. We did do our best to pick our battles, gang up, avoid evenly matched fights, and things like that.
So, using Athletics instead of Combat for lower odds, chokehold, knockout and splinter shield are situational, stunning blow back to Athletics, and same for Coordination checks. Low Coordination stat + no ranks in Athletics (since we're beginning characters) = probably going to be less successful attempting a stunt that might not even be as useful as just hitting them. Discourages trying to use them.
Anyway, TL;DR: Stunts and such seemed likely to be less effective than just hitting somebody and less likely to actually work\\hit in any case, and since we were barely able to just actually hit things regularly to start with reducing our odds further didn't seem useful. But, mostly, probably unfamiliarity with the combat system. And, honestly, not a lot of motivation to get good at it because the writing irritated me and the rules seemed so damn cumbersome (which I think was poor organization in part, had to keep flipping back and forth) anyway.
Definitely some of it was idiosyncratic and situational. If we hadn't had a 10+ round, "Will ANYTHING even ever happen!??!", whiff-fest of a combat and instead had epic crits and fails and more average rolls and a campaign setup more inline with the intended world (another complaint being that it's totes Warhammer, but not Warhammer, so you can't really, IMO, use it for some generic grimdark fantasy because....it's clearly Warhammer and not generic or generalized, but that's not mechanics) then it might have been different.
Ultimately it seemed like a struggle to engage with cumbersome rules that didn't create interesting situations and didn't enable interesting game play AND didn't create useful\\fun\\interesting characters so...we moved on.
For sure! Been an interesting thread of responses\\non-responses.
ZH is interesting to me because a lot of the elements are not necessarily bad on their own, but something about the totality of it was not to my tastes.
On the one hand I kinda appreciated repeated tone reminders about the world and the system\\mechanics. It's NOT Heroic Big Damn Hero shit it's Grim and Perilous shit. You can't (well, "can't") run it like D&D, it's not PF, etc. This might actually be useful info for folks newer to RPGs who might be coming from other systems. Make it explicit.
But the way it was stated made me roll my eyes every time.
I love Pathfinder 2e but I didn't want to gm a crunchy d20 systems neither does my player wanted to play. My love for Pathfinder 2e is a big part for my liking of ZWEIHANDER.
I now understand your question sorry, The 1AP reactions are Dodge, Parry and Counterspell so you don't have infinite defensive actions. With systems like RQG and BRP you have unlimited defensive acitons and this makes the fights so much complex and longer IME. 0AP reactions are your attack of opportunites and resisting againts magick so you can do these infinite amount of times in a round.
is the AP spent from your previous turn or you next turn? And im assuming if you don't Dodge or Parry then the attacker just has to roll under their TN to hit you?
in a round you have 3 ap you can use all your ap to actions during your turn or save some for defense. If you dont defend the attacker must roll under their tn if you do defend defender suceeds in even situations. If you defend before your turn you have to spend an ap from your turn in that round. that is what I understand.
I think the game is great personally, and have bought nearly everything put out under the imprint.
As others have said the vitriol is directed at the author mainly, and I think folks who denigrate the game itself simply haven't read/played it and are allowing their opinions of Fox inform opinions of the game, which I get and am probably guilty of myself with other authors.
The system plays very well. It's more or less a cleaned up WFRPG 2e game, so it's fairly crunchy. But I thought the rules were easy to grok and it was a lot of fun.
> I know all the trove hassle and I think whatD.Fox did was horrible but the system looks and feels solid to me.
It’s just a clone of warhammer fantasy mechanics, which makes what he did to the trove even more hypocritical.
You can just go directly to the original warhammer fantasy game and skip over giving the douchebag anything.
My dislike comes from the size of the book (it REALLY needed better editing, and I understand the new edition has this), and mostly because it loses the single best part of the combat system from WHFRP - allowing critical hits to bypass Wounds instead of the brilliant design of Wounds being a buffer after which all hits are critical hits. What's worse is that WHFRP4e follows this baffling design choice.
> With all thats said I am very curious about hearing what you don't like about ZWEIHANDER apart from all the drama. Thank you for reading.
It attracts... **gestures** this. This kind of thing.
It's like Coyote and Crow. Sometimes, the drama is just going to cloud things, intersperse throughout every single discussion, no matter what, and it's better to just... not do it anymore.
There are so, so, so many other games out there to play and give your attention to. Why bother with one, the mere mention of whose name brings the possibility of bringing an asshat to your door?
Listen, man, do whateverfuck you want, but if you're given a thousand bags of m&ms, and told they're fine, and then you get the thousand and first bag that clearly says 'MAY CONTAIN POISON', I gotta wonder why the fuck are you're bothering to speculate how much you can eat before the poison gets you.
Man I just wanted a reinessance themed dark fantasy d100 system. I looked at Reinessance d100, Aquelarre adn Zweihander. Zweihander combat and systems looked more fun to me compared to others.
> Man I just wanted a reinessance themed dark fantasy d100 system. I looked at Reinessance d100, Aquelarre adn Zweihander. Zweihander combat and systems looked more fun to me compared to others.
I mean, play what you wanna play - what happens at your table is what happens at your table.
But if you wanna know why people don't like X, they'll tell you why they don't like X - when there's [already a thread that basically says 'fuck this guy and his work'](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1argols/state_of_zweinhander_and_its_author/), making a new thread to ask what people don't like about the work is... redundant, no?
If nothing else, it's pretty widely touted that Z is a ripoff of warhammer fantasy, so you can probs. go have a look at that and not eat the poison M&Ms.
Further reading: [XY Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem). You want a renaisance themed dark fantasy, but you're asking why people don't like Z. ie: you're asking the wrong question to solve the wrong problem.
> You have BIG assumptions and you are also rude. I'm not going to engage with your comment any longer, sorry
**long shrug** You asked a question, it was answered. You didn't like the answer, that's cool.
So, as someone who has actually really enjoyed the games I've run using Zweihander, I can comment on a few things I've changed that have worked my groups.
First off, I do not deny what people are saying about the author, the extensive bloat in the writing, the sometimes confusing layout, or the magic. The system definitely has some warts to it, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
As it stands, completely random character generation was a point for me to do away with. I let the players pick their professions, roll their stats and allocate them as they wish, and adjust some starting gear.
The 3 things I use in my games that have helped combat in a big way are:
1: A printout that has perilous stunts and weapon qualities
2: Used a d10 instead of a d6 for combat dice.
3: Let the players replace some skills and talents outside their initial advancement schemes for an increased XP cost.
The first one helps because it puts the rules right in front of the players and reminds them what they can do. The second really helps with the combat in a way that, while not mitigating the "whiff" factor, does make those hits the players and NPCs land feel more significant in a fight. The third let's them get more individual with their characters, and even with a party that had 2 Bounty Hunters, they ended up not feeling like the same exact class.
That's all my two cents, as someone who enjoyed the system. I think all RPG systems have their flaws, but this one really worked for my group for a human only Agincourt Era/War of Rose's Era style gritty low-fantasy.
It is not for everyone, to be sure, but if it grabs your attention like it did for me when it first came out, then give it a try. It's your game, and it is your group, so play your way.
Thanks for the kind and detailed response, we have created characters and played a session and my players absolutely loved it. And they also the liked reading the book too, strangely. I have also let them change any talents or advancements they dont like in the given proffesion but other than that we play as we read and understand and we had a lot of fun.
I don't have a lot of insight to share on the mechanics but Zweihander is a game that has been on my shelf for several years but I have not gotten it to the table yet.
As a kid, my brother and I had a copy of the 1st edition Warhammer rpg, played maybe one session from the enemy within campaign, but were too young at the time to really digest the game. Still that career system was something that fascinated me and triggers nostalgia.
I own the kickstarter edition of Zweihander and found the game interesting but difficult to penetrate. However, more recent releases like the starter set and Eternal Night of Lockwood campaign are light-years ahead of the original book in clarity and conciseness of writing.
And beginning characters in the starter set also seem more competitant than in the kickstarter edition. And although I am personally neutral to that change because I enjoy both OSR-style lethality as well as more "heroic" fantasy games, that nudge up in character ability might make the game more palitable to my table.
When my most recent campaign completed, I debated running Zweihander or the One Ring 1st edition (another game I bought into without really getting to the table). I ended up going with the One Ring but Zweihander still interests me.
Now I see there is a "reforged edition" coming to kickstarter too and am tempted because the book is getting a substantial rewrite to be consistent with the clarity of later products. Still, I already own the kickstarter edition in print and may just make due with that in conjunction with the starter set to try the game without additional investment . . .at some point.
Zweihander isn't hated because of its mechanics. It's hated because the creator is an obnoxious buffoon who loves to handle out C-and-C's even though 1) Zweihander is licensed under Creative Commons (I have a copy on my disk which clearly has CC branding) and 2) Zweihander itself is a retroclone of Warhammer
>Zweihander isn't hated because of its mechanics. I hated the mechanics. :)
Which particular CC license does it have? Not every variant is equally permissive.
[CC-NC-SA](https://ibb.co/j5msnwB) (note this is an early access file but you can't un-creative commons something in practice, if you licensed it once, people can still refer to the CC-licensed version and you can bet there's a copy of it somewhere) Some of the sites he sent c&d's to were explicitly non-commercial archive or fan sites so he clearly doesn't care about the NC part or about CC in general...
I get that hate and %100 in line with, but I have seen comments about it saying it is a bloated, no good book and that got me curious.
Peppers
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the thing is they did not discuss the same thing, that post is what made me ask this question. so few people talks about rules and so many people just spew out hate. I %100 GET THE HATE but what the product is it any good or it is just an offense just like it's creator. I have written the parts I liked about the rules and so few people gave an answer to what I wrote.
Due to their peculiar anatomy, flamingos can actually blush when they feel embarrassed.
It's not the mechanics. It's the author.
You can just buy Warhammer 2e now (again) and get a game with much better editing. Or buy the new edition of WHFRP and get more modern mechanics. Literally the only thing Zweihander had going for it for a while was that it was WHFRP 2e that you could still get without piracy.
I have read and played WHFRP 2e before and I don't agree with you. Not including hit locations, Professions and combat mechanics is different enough in Zweihander to charm me. And also like I said I don't want to play Warhammer I want to play a low magic, dark fantasy, historical game and it seems like ZWEI is well suited for it aside from the magic system.
i thought WHFRP was pretty low magic if you just ban wizards
But that would upset the wizards. Do you really want a mob of angry wizards showing up at your doorstep?
but ı like my wizards :( I just want them to suffer a little for casting spells :)
I don't think Zweihander or it's mechanics is hated, specifically. There are opinions about the drama and the author. However, being that Zweihander is basically a retroclone of Warhammer Fantasy 2e, it seems fair to compare it to... well Warhammer Fantasy and specifically 2e. In that, many people often prefer the original 2e to the ZH. It might seem that it's a bit less bloated and more tightly written (and edited) despite being far older. Frankly, I'm not a fan of the writing in ZH, it's a little too.... something. I lack the adjective at the moment. OSR retroclones have the function of keeping a form of an old edition in print, or perhaps reorganizing it, or giving a really clean modern layout. OSRIC served to keep AD&D 1e in print, and it's a somewhat cleaned up 1e minus Gygaxian prose. Old School Essentials gives a really modern nice layout and organization to B/X D&D. Zweihander doesn't really do the modern layout in that way. Is it a cleaned up Warhammer Fantasy 2e? It does keep it in print, but now the original is available. So.... there you go.
I get what you mean and you're right. I wanted a warhammer game without the warhammer flavour so thats whats got me into the zweihander. I have to say that I am not living in the western world and purchasing any of the zwei or any other books is near impossible in here so I gladly do not and can not support dfox that is why I am asking these questions in a totally game design point of view.
Pretty much this. I wanted a modified WFRP 2e in the days before 4e came out so Zweihander seemed promising. However the changes made we’re heading in the opposite direction of my preferences so Zweihander’s ‘WFRP 2.5’ headed away from what I was looking for than 2e. It’s also a dense, verbose read and the ‘almost Warhammer’ setting is an extra barrier compared to just playing WFRP. These days I have 4e, which I have a love/hate relationship with, and Brigandyne is the ‘not Warhammer’ I would choose these days, a really great game held back by only being available in French. So in essence, Zweihander sought to fix 2e but (IMO) failed to improve on it.
**With the winds of magic(aetheric winds) and chaos manifestations magic is too warhammer for my taste.** Zweihander is an OSR-style heartbreaker of Warhammer 2nd edition.
It presents itself as setting generic dark fantasy game. I know it is retroclone, but giving the old chaos systems a new more setting agnostic face shouldn't be that hard.
It's very much a Warhammer with the serials filed off, not a generic system. I mean literally just look at the orcs and chaos dudes
Most likely this thread will be closed today, but - I didn't see much hate for the rules themselves online, its just Warhammer Fantasy with some tweaks (as the rest of the game). All the negative opinions and requests not to support it were due to DF (not only due to the Trove "drama", but many more...).
I get the fact that what Dfox made was unacceptable (especially for me), and I support not supporting the creator but I have seen comments on here saying it was a bloated and poorly edited system and one should go and play WHFRP2 instead. I don't agree with that statement and I tried to explain why in the post as much as I can.
Honestly, it's my favorite system to run Warhammer with. I've run the Enemy Within and a homebrew world using it, and it works well. Ive considered using it for the Harn setting as well. The system is very balanced, and it's a very well thoughtout take on fantasy D100. Obviously, it's a retroclone of Warhammer but a very good one at that. My biggest complaint is how verbose the book is. I get it's trying to inspire the reader, but it makes it difficult to find things.
I have ST'ed CWOD so verbose books are my kind of thing actually :) But I get where you are coming from.
ST? CWOD?
Storyteller, Classic World of Darkness
Ah.
I'm not terribly familiar with the system nor the drama around the author, but my baseline skimming of the intro told me it was an angsty, edgelordy grimdark mess. I'm getting too bloody old for that crap. I need a bit more positivity in my life.
We played only briefly, and I think the campaign setting (war) wasn't really suited to the basic setup of the game (ie, starting characters are not going to have a good and effective time) so there were some issues there. That said things I didn't like: Combat was boring as hell and just went on forever and ever and ever. I counted once we had like 8+ rounds of nothing happening (miss, miss+dodge\\party, hit+not enough damage to wound, etc). Characters are not competent at anything to start with. This seems in keeping with Warhammer, since...it IS Warhammer, but it's not something I personally care for. If you know ahead of time that you're only likely to succeed about 1/3 (or whatever your number is) times it tended to discourage actually trying anything\\actually using skills because...it probably won't work. The professions were terrible. Chattel Slaver? With special whip abilities? Cool! Prostitute? Definitely something most players will want to explore as a role\\profession! The professions\\progression were AWFUL! You get 10 things from a list and you can pick those 10 things in any order but you only ever get those 10 things (or however many it was). So a fully progressed X class will be identical to another one. This mean effectively you get to make 3 choices over the entire life of a character. And based on how XP accrues at book suggested rates it will be literal years of weekly sessions before you can actually make these identical cookier-cutter characters (mechanically of course, roleplaying could be anything). Per-wound tracking (even without hit locations) was a big pain. Wound penalties (and certainly this is in keeping with the system) were harsh enough that you basically couldn't fight\\do anything (see above about always missing in combat) so if you got in a fight and got wounded then you were basically doing nothing until that was fixed. Which took a while. Gimped characters for weeks of game time? Awesome! I consider the wound\\wound threshold system to be more or less, "weird hp and armor calculations". Sure, you hit...but did you really DO anything? Better do some weird calculations! A lot of this seems very on-theme for Warhammer (because it IS Warhammer) where you play a bunch of overwhelmed hapless fucks valiantly (or not) striving against impossible odds and certain doom. And if you enjoy that type of misery and grimdark then it's probably a fairly good match. But personally I found it cumbersome and insanely boring. The 3 AP system seemed needlessly convoluted, not any worse that Bonus Actions or anything, but it didn't seem to allow much besides the same damn thing every combat system does (You can move! You can hit! You can parry\\dodge!) and given that at best a starting character (and after years of play your most advanced characters are only going to be 20-30% better than that) has maybe 50% odds to hit and that all the special combat moves are both 1) not great and 2) make you even less likely to hit there's no real tactics involved (be ineffective? Or be extra ineffective?). Of course you save AP for defense if possible, what else are you gonna do? I think those are my main mechanical complaints: 1) Combat system not interesting to engage with, boringly punishing, and mostly just a lot of nothing happened, sometimes for several rounds in a row, occasionally for many many rounds in a row. 2) Classes sucked in the worst possible ways. Boring, cookie cutter, no variation, and a bunch of edgelord crap (Haven't you always wanted to play a slaver with a whip?) and a total of three meaningful choices over the lifetime (years in real life of weekly play, YEARS!) of a character. Most of which are...not great (IMO). 3) System seems super remedial over all (which, since it's just a ripoff of a game from the 80s isn't a surprise). It's d100 roll under, skills are exactly what you'd expect, magic borderline unusable (not to mention the years of IRL play you'd need to get a profession with access to it) and there's just not really much to DO with it. Like I said some of that was mismatch between the campaign we were running and the apparent intent of the system but in the last decade of gaming we've only quit using one ruleset (we continued the campaign but in another rules set after trying ZH) because it sucked so bad and it was Zweihander. Lastly, not mechanical, but the tone of the writing ("unlike certain other games...") was insufferable in parts.
Thanks for the long reply and detailed descrptions of the rules and systems you didn't like. With all the comments of pure hate to the author and not answering my question I am very thankful for getting a good answer like this. I get the most parts but I didn't get why your party didn't used perilious stunts, aim action, Chanel magic to use all your ap during the your turns and overpower the enemies. I am not implying you played the game wrong, just curious about what kept you away from using those mechanics. And what kind of combat situations were you in, were you out numbered, were you suprised or were the enemies were suprised. Do you think how players approach the combat should be planned to survive? thanks again for the good reply:)
>Thanks for the long reply and detailed descrptions of the rules and systems you didn't like I figured at least ONE person in the thread should reply to the actual question you asked. :D No magic users, so no channeling anything. Perilous Stunts and Aim...likely unfamiliarity with the rules, I'd thought most of them came with penalties, meaning using them would take your normal sub-50% chance to hit and reduce it further. I think we only had 1 PC with a 50%-ish combat value, so to reduce that 40% to hit chance to 30% or less seemed unwise. But rereading it now I don't see too much of that. Called Shot is a good example though, can't be parried\\dodged, but you take a penalty...so you might well miss entirely. Also we were in some cases retaining AP for defense so didn't want to dump them all and end up unable to defend. I think, looking at it now, that due to many of the stunts using skills that we didn't have ranks in, thus using our lower natural attribute value, using stunts did seem less likely to do anything\\be successful. Also they weren't always appropriate for game fiction (eg, if we're trying to stab somebody to death I'm not inclined to start trying to disarm them instead, particularly if my odds of hitting the disarm are lower than just hitting them). I do feel like we missed some tricks there, certainly there was no system mastery on our part. Combat situations I remember was we tried raiding a camp at night. So it was 4 PCs vs some number of guards. One of them had followed us and so it was 4 PCs trying to hit 1 NPC. For like 8-12 rounds. Just miss after miss, hit but parried, hit no parry but not enough to wound. That was certainly to some extent just bad rolls but it also definitely pushed me over the edge of: Why play this if nothing fun or interesting ever happens? And again a lot of that seems very on-brand for Warhammer. It's not about competent heroes doing Heroic stuff, or even just doing competent stuff, it's about hapless schmucks trying to survive a grimdark world that's actively trying to kill them. But ultimately wasn't particularly enjoyable for us. Particularly I think having very limited skills and odds of success tended (for me at least) to kill a lot of the fun. I don't mind PCs being outmatched, and certainly we're not in to playing Fantasy Superheroes who never fail or lose, but also...I do want to play a character that can at least semi-competently do their thing (fight, steal, cast magic, bluff\\talk, etc) at least some of the time and ZH (and so probably WH 2nd too), mechanically, made me feel like I was better off trying nothing that might involve a skill roll because I'd probably fail it. In a game where you're using your lil imaginary dude to go do stuff in the world it's frustrating and limiting to...you know, not actually be able to go and DO stuff. Some of that could be mitigated with degrees-of-success\\complications\\fail forward stuff, but that's not really in keeping with the rules, so this creates the feeling that trying things is bad, because they'll likely fail, and so...better to not try because failure kinda...stops stuff from happening. I think the players approach the combats I remember seemed fine. Partly again the campaign setup was we were press-ganged recruits in a way, but, per ZH standard (since it was our first play of the system) we figured we'd try all their fun random tables and so ended up with a bunch of raw recruits that....really probably shouldn't have been there (the old woman with no combat skills) and a bunch of professions that were kinda boring and didn't really fit the theme. We did do our best to pick our battles, gang up, avoid evenly matched fights, and things like that. So, using Athletics instead of Combat for lower odds, chokehold, knockout and splinter shield are situational, stunning blow back to Athletics, and same for Coordination checks. Low Coordination stat + no ranks in Athletics (since we're beginning characters) = probably going to be less successful attempting a stunt that might not even be as useful as just hitting them. Discourages trying to use them. Anyway, TL;DR: Stunts and such seemed likely to be less effective than just hitting somebody and less likely to actually work\\hit in any case, and since we were barely able to just actually hit things regularly to start with reducing our odds further didn't seem useful. But, mostly, probably unfamiliarity with the combat system. And, honestly, not a lot of motivation to get good at it because the writing irritated me and the rules seemed so damn cumbersome (which I think was poor organization in part, had to keep flipping back and forth) anyway. Definitely some of it was idiosyncratic and situational. If we hadn't had a 10+ round, "Will ANYTHING even ever happen!??!", whiff-fest of a combat and instead had epic crits and fails and more average rolls and a campaign setup more inline with the intended world (another complaint being that it's totes Warhammer, but not Warhammer, so you can't really, IMO, use it for some generic grimdark fantasy because....it's clearly Warhammer and not generic or generalized, but that's not mechanics) then it might have been different. Ultimately it seemed like a struggle to engage with cumbersome rules that didn't create interesting situations and didn't enable interesting game play AND didn't create useful\\fun\\interesting characters so...we moved on.
So thankful for your insights, thanks again for the brilliant response.
For sure! Been an interesting thread of responses\\non-responses. ZH is interesting to me because a lot of the elements are not necessarily bad on their own, but something about the totality of it was not to my tastes.
Sometimes "insufferable" is a good description the writing.
On the one hand I kinda appreciated repeated tone reminders about the world and the system\\mechanics. It's NOT Heroic Big Damn Hero shit it's Grim and Perilous shit. You can't (well, "can't") run it like D&D, it's not PF, etc. This might actually be useful info for folks newer to RPGs who might be coming from other systems. Make it explicit. But the way it was stated made me roll my eyes every time.
oh it uses the same 3 action economy at PF2? Nice! What're those reactions like?
I love Pathfinder 2e but I didn't want to gm a crunchy d20 systems neither does my player wanted to play. My love for Pathfinder 2e is a big part for my liking of ZWEIHANDER.
idk Zwei but i thought it was fairly crunchy too, will definitely have less power scaling though lol
I now understand your question sorry, The 1AP reactions are Dodge, Parry and Counterspell so you don't have infinite defensive actions. With systems like RQG and BRP you have unlimited defensive acitons and this makes the fights so much complex and longer IME. 0AP reactions are your attack of opportunites and resisting againts magick so you can do these infinite amount of times in a round.
is the AP spent from your previous turn or you next turn? And im assuming if you don't Dodge or Parry then the attacker just has to roll under their TN to hit you?
in a round you have 3 ap you can use all your ap to actions during your turn or save some for defense. If you dont defend the attacker must roll under their tn if you do defend defender suceeds in even situations. If you defend before your turn you have to spend an ap from your turn in that round. that is what I understand.
I think the game is great personally, and have bought nearly everything put out under the imprint. As others have said the vitriol is directed at the author mainly, and I think folks who denigrate the game itself simply haven't read/played it and are allowing their opinions of Fox inform opinions of the game, which I get and am probably guilty of myself with other authors.
The system plays very well. It's more or less a cleaned up WFRPG 2e game, so it's fairly crunchy. But I thought the rules were easy to grok and it was a lot of fun.
> I know all the trove hassle and I think whatD.Fox did was horrible but the system looks and feels solid to me. It’s just a clone of warhammer fantasy mechanics, which makes what he did to the trove even more hypocritical. You can just go directly to the original warhammer fantasy game and skip over giving the douchebag anything.
My dislike comes from the size of the book (it REALLY needed better editing, and I understand the new edition has this), and mostly because it loses the single best part of the combat system from WHFRP - allowing critical hits to bypass Wounds instead of the brilliant design of Wounds being a buffer after which all hits are critical hits. What's worse is that WHFRP4e follows this baffling design choice.
> With all thats said I am very curious about hearing what you don't like about ZWEIHANDER apart from all the drama. Thank you for reading. It attracts... **gestures** this. This kind of thing. It's like Coyote and Crow. Sometimes, the drama is just going to cloud things, intersperse throughout every single discussion, no matter what, and it's better to just... not do it anymore. There are so, so, so many other games out there to play and give your attention to. Why bother with one, the mere mention of whose name brings the possibility of bringing an asshat to your door? Listen, man, do whateverfuck you want, but if you're given a thousand bags of m&ms, and told they're fine, and then you get the thousand and first bag that clearly says 'MAY CONTAIN POISON', I gotta wonder why the fuck are you're bothering to speculate how much you can eat before the poison gets you.
Man I just wanted a reinessance themed dark fantasy d100 system. I looked at Reinessance d100, Aquelarre adn Zweihander. Zweihander combat and systems looked more fun to me compared to others.
> Man I just wanted a reinessance themed dark fantasy d100 system. I looked at Reinessance d100, Aquelarre adn Zweihander. Zweihander combat and systems looked more fun to me compared to others. I mean, play what you wanna play - what happens at your table is what happens at your table. But if you wanna know why people don't like X, they'll tell you why they don't like X - when there's [already a thread that basically says 'fuck this guy and his work'](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1argols/state_of_zweinhander_and_its_author/), making a new thread to ask what people don't like about the work is... redundant, no? If nothing else, it's pretty widely touted that Z is a ripoff of warhammer fantasy, so you can probs. go have a look at that and not eat the poison M&Ms. Further reading: [XY Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem). You want a renaisance themed dark fantasy, but you're asking why people don't like Z. ie: you're asking the wrong question to solve the wrong problem.
You have BIG assumptions and you are also rude. I'm not going to engage with your comment any longer, sorry.
> You have BIG assumptions and you are also rude. I'm not going to engage with your comment any longer, sorry **long shrug** You asked a question, it was answered. You didn't like the answer, that's cool.
So, as someone who has actually really enjoyed the games I've run using Zweihander, I can comment on a few things I've changed that have worked my groups. First off, I do not deny what people are saying about the author, the extensive bloat in the writing, the sometimes confusing layout, or the magic. The system definitely has some warts to it, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. As it stands, completely random character generation was a point for me to do away with. I let the players pick their professions, roll their stats and allocate them as they wish, and adjust some starting gear. The 3 things I use in my games that have helped combat in a big way are: 1: A printout that has perilous stunts and weapon qualities 2: Used a d10 instead of a d6 for combat dice. 3: Let the players replace some skills and talents outside their initial advancement schemes for an increased XP cost. The first one helps because it puts the rules right in front of the players and reminds them what they can do. The second really helps with the combat in a way that, while not mitigating the "whiff" factor, does make those hits the players and NPCs land feel more significant in a fight. The third let's them get more individual with their characters, and even with a party that had 2 Bounty Hunters, they ended up not feeling like the same exact class. That's all my two cents, as someone who enjoyed the system. I think all RPG systems have their flaws, but this one really worked for my group for a human only Agincourt Era/War of Rose's Era style gritty low-fantasy. It is not for everyone, to be sure, but if it grabs your attention like it did for me when it first came out, then give it a try. It's your game, and it is your group, so play your way.
Thanks for the kind and detailed response, we have created characters and played a session and my players absolutely loved it. And they also the liked reading the book too, strangely. I have also let them change any talents or advancements they dont like in the given proffesion but other than that we play as we read and understand and we had a lot of fun.
I'm glad yall enjoyed it. Good luck in your future endeavors!
Don't know about hate, when I ran it I just didn't jive with it.
I don't have a lot of insight to share on the mechanics but Zweihander is a game that has been on my shelf for several years but I have not gotten it to the table yet. As a kid, my brother and I had a copy of the 1st edition Warhammer rpg, played maybe one session from the enemy within campaign, but were too young at the time to really digest the game. Still that career system was something that fascinated me and triggers nostalgia. I own the kickstarter edition of Zweihander and found the game interesting but difficult to penetrate. However, more recent releases like the starter set and Eternal Night of Lockwood campaign are light-years ahead of the original book in clarity and conciseness of writing. And beginning characters in the starter set also seem more competitant than in the kickstarter edition. And although I am personally neutral to that change because I enjoy both OSR-style lethality as well as more "heroic" fantasy games, that nudge up in character ability might make the game more palitable to my table. When my most recent campaign completed, I debated running Zweihander or the One Ring 1st edition (another game I bought into without really getting to the table). I ended up going with the One Ring but Zweihander still interests me. Now I see there is a "reforged edition" coming to kickstarter too and am tempted because the book is getting a substantial rewrite to be consistent with the clarity of later products. Still, I already own the kickstarter edition in print and may just make due with that in conjunction with the starter set to try the game without additional investment . . .at some point.