I've said before and I still stand by this: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2E is the best edition of WFRP. Long story short, WFRP1 is very 1980s in design, WFRP4 edition has succumbed to both unnecessary wokeness and the propensity of 5E Dungeons & Dragons to keep characters alive at all costs, it also adds yet another elf race, which is two too many elf races. WFRP3 isn't a WFRP game, it's a reskin of a weird not-very-Star Wars game where you have to spend 5 minutes after rolling a bunch of dice with weird symbols on them to figure out if you successfully blasted a stormtrooper. WFRP3 is trash and this is the last I'll talk about it. Zweihander had a lot of promise but has no character in comparison to WFRP. Partially this was on purpose due to trying to generic-fy WFRP, which simply ruins essential elements of it.
I've said all that to say this. For the longest time I thought WFRP2 was a game that required only one houserule: random roll race (with a minimum 75% chance for Human). That has changed lately. Maybe I've fallen out of love with it. Maybe in my old age I'm becoming more critical of game systems.
Long Character Creation: If you aren't lucky enough to have access to my stupidly large ~10000 line utterly random character generator, character generation can take upwards of 20 minutes which isn't all that much fun when your previous character just died. Most games would consider this short chargen, but anything slower than OD&D is considered slow by my current standards.
Rigid Career System: Say I begin this game as a Rat Catcher. Per the rules I need nine advances (and am restricted by career as to where I get those advances) after the start of the game to get out of the career, or spend the equivalent of two advances (not getting those advances) to take a walk to another career path. Elsewhere in the book it states under no uncertain terms that the character is now an "Adventurer" as their career, meaning the starting career is more of a failed career or former career. Well, which is it?
I'd rather have freeform escalation of abilities over time. I'd rather if the career was already in the past. So instead of "Starting Career", it should be "Former Career". As the character is actually an adventurer now. It allows disparate characters to get together easier as well. Why does a Noble hang out with a Vagabond? Well, they are both adventurers now. To lesser degrees they remain what they were, but now they have something in common.
This in short requires a rewrite of nearly the entire game beyond the initial character creation, because advance schemes are what holds the game back and makes it more about the build than about the narrative flow. You get no choices at character creation, and every choice thereafter. Let's say my Rat Catcher gets in a lot of bar fights. I want to be able to take Very Resilient to show his improved toughness. The game does not let me do that, there's a +5 toughness in the advance scheme but since progression is so incremental, +10 is when you actually start seeing real progress, not +5. It'd work better if the game used a d20 instead of percentile dice, because each side of a d20 is 5%.
Bad Dice: This problem is partially to do with percentile dice is really the game (and all percentile games, BRP, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, etc) is a d10 system where only one in ten times will the second d10 roll matter (and now that you know that, you'll never un-know that). You're better off using a d20 for percentile checks. The die is more fun, and there's less pointless plastic that requires you read both dice.
Tolkienisms: Halflings are fucking lame and not made to be adventurers. Dwarves and Elves are alright, but SO FUCKING played out. I love the Empire, except that humans aren't the one and only playable race. The game heavily hints that the other races should be seldom, few, and far between, but I've never seen a party without a dwarf or elf contained therein.
So yeah, even "perfect" games have some problems.
