This week we received our first ever question to the editor from a reader, and he’s looking for some help.
Chris is a high-school teacher in New York who is the advisor to the students’ Warhammer club. Chris is an avid D&D player with plenty of minis. The students want to have a big Warhammer campaign-ending event where their armies clash both against each other and some D&D creatures guarding an ancient treasure. I’ll let him explain the problem:
Basically, the kids have the Warhammer Club and for the final battle of the first campaign they want to have a free-for-all in which their armies are going up against each other AND some of my DnD miniatures. They saw some of the monsters and thought it would be great if they could have their armies fight the huge dragons and other creatures I have. The thing is, I need to figure out how to translate (basically create from scratch really) statistics and point values for playing Warhammer with some of these minis.
In talking to the club’s president today, the idea goes like this: All of the players will each deploy their warhammer armies in a different corner of the table. In the center will be an artifact of ancient power, defended by several horrific creatures… the DnD miniatures. Most notably they seem to want to fight the Purple Worms that I have, along with Chimeras, Howlers, etc. Now, I easily have the DnD stats for these creatures, but what would should I set the WS,BS,S,T,W,I,A,Ld scores for these monsters? How many points would such creatures cost in Warhammer? There in lies my dilema.
So, any ideas? I figured that having these stats would be useful to others who play warhammer, to add an extra element with rampaging monsters. However, I could not for the life of me find anyone who seems to have done this before. I did find a Warhammer Bestiary online, but while they had stats for a few monsters, there were no point values and that makes it difficult to set up an even fight for the kids’ armies.
Can anyone out there help Chris out? Has anyone out there done anything similar, or seen a similar project online (that hasn’t been destroyed by lawyers?) The fate of an epic battle rests in your hands.
I believe the easiest way to do this is to take the latest Warhammer Codex and fit each D&D monster to the closest beasty you find.
Purple Worm = Any Dragon like creature or Chaos Sphere of Maggot (I’m not a Warhammer player so I’m not very precise) + add a power that it eats a non PC creature on Warhammer’s equivalent of a crit (like a 6)
WS and BS == attack modifier
S == str
T and W == Con and HP and AC
I == Dex modifier
A == attack modifier # of attacks
Ld == Cha
You will have to find a standard to work from. Find a base orc or human and that will give you a pretty translation point. Build a sort of rosetta stone based on that. Orcs have around a WS of 3 or something. Their attack bonus is +3. So maybe for every attack bonus they have give them 1 WS. I think this would give way too much WS though so maybe use just the base attack bonus for this – not modified by str bonus and such.
If you want to just fudge numbers take a look at the old warhammer fantasy rp beastiary or warhammer quest beastiary and you can find stuff in those.
Honestly, as long as you tell them you put thought into it they will probably be happy.
Sounds like a fun idea but a pain in the butt to do, good luck.
Well, today is the big battle. To some degree I have decided to go the easy route. Warhammer does have stats (including point values) for giants. Granted their giants are just large, lumbering simple minded creatures and the stats reflect that. I, however, will be using my Cloud Giant minis and they will be the main guards. Then, there will also be 1 or 2 chimeras and a Huge Fiendish Spiders in there as well. I followed your suggestions and I think the stats are pretty good, but I’m still at a bit of a loss for point values. I want to make sure the figures aren’t over powered to what the player are putting on the board and that will be the true test this afternoon. Hopefully I will be able to report back that we had a successful battle (and the kids did not get wiped out by the monsters).
Thank you again, to everyone for their help. I really appreciate it.
–Chris
Rauthik: Worst case, you can always introduce a world event that hinders the monsters or fudge their stats if they are totally tearing apart what the players are using. Fudging their number of wounds might be the easiest and least invasive way of doing that.
Thank you to everyone again for all your help. The battle went very well, though a bit chaotic with there being five players. But then, Warhammer is more or less designed to have 1 on 1 battles. Truthfully, the kids were more concerned with wiping out each other, that they did not really focus on the creatures guarding the treasure. So, overall, I think it worked out well and (again) thank you for all your help.
—Chris
Large multi-player warhammer battles, in my experience, tend to be successful when the players focus less on balancing and more on creating a scenario or storyline. While one could argue this is true with all warhammer games, I find that it is certainly more the case with larger ones. Perhaps it is because a 1 vs. 1 game is perceived more as a test of skill or a match between opponents, whereas a large game with multiple players is perceived as a group of friends just slugging it out against each other for fun. I don’t know. It also might have something to do with the (correct) perception that the rules are supposed to be balanced in 1 vs. 1 games, and not so much in multi-player games.
what attacks do giants do?
what attacks do gians do eg. wen u role a one on the dice wat does it do and do for all numbers 1 to 6 on a dice thanx
Well, I have found Giants are a strange unit in Warhammer. They do all sorts of crazy things and this is what I downloaded from the Games Workshop site (before they totally changed the layout about a month ago).
fighting big things
1 Yell and Bawl
2-4 Thump with club
5-6 Headbutt
fighting medium and smaller things
1 Yell and Bawl
2 Jump up and down
3 Pick up and…
4-6 Swing with club
Yell and bawl: basically the unit makes a break test with a -2
Jump up and down: test to see if he falls over. If not then the unit takes 2d6 str 6 hits. Giant will do so the next round as well if he did not fall (retest to see if he falls in next round)
swing with club: D6 Str 6 hits
Thump with club: unit gets an Initiative test to avoid being hit. If hit then 2D6 wounds, no armor save
Headbutt: 1 wound with no armor save.. if not slain the target is dazed (loses all following attacks)
Pick up and… (this gets weird)
1 – stuff into bag: model is removed, can be freed if Giant is slain
2 throw back into combat: model is thrown at own unit D6 str 3 hits
3 Hurl – hurled at any enemy unit in 12″ D6 str 3 hits
4 Squash – model is killed
5 Eat – Model is killed
6 Pick another – model is stuffed in bag or pants (not good) and rolls again. Next victim gets a single attack
Of course there is a ton of flavor text to go with all that, but that’s the basics of what they posted. Hope that helps.