So, Sunday night a friend of ours was up from Olympia and a whole bunch of us decided to have a little impromptu meet-up to hang out with him. When we first got there, it was just John Harper, Sage, and their friends Shannon and Paul. They’ve been playing Warhammer FRP, and just started on their second careers, except for Paul whose character died heroically in battle.
I voiced my gripe that playing first level characters in Warhammer makes me insane because you can’t DO anything.
Me: “Look, I’m the healer and… I just dropped the band-aid.”
Shannon: “In the dirt, and someone puked on it, and they had the plague!”
Yes, first level characters in Warhammer are EXACTLY like that. Except for elves, which can do everything, but have only get one fate point, which if you’re not paying attention and are fighting bad guys on the docks and you get knocked into the water in full plate and do not have the “swim” skill, you’re going to be burning through pretty darn quickly.
No, that wasn’t my character (for a change), but it did happen in a game.
I swear, if I ever run Warhammer, I’m starting everyone in their second career. Or, as Ogre said, he plans starting them at level one, but keeping it really light and ROLE-play oriented and handing out copious amounts of player handjobs, er, experience points.
Geek Girls Rule!!! 
Dark Heresy, the new(ish) WH40K roleplaying game starts everyone out with 400 XP.
Granted, you also can’t use a “bolt gun” until 4th level (or whatever they call those notches on the career path). Laser gun, yes. “Bolt gun,” no.
I read a Dark Heresy actual play report where the players decided that they’d roll d00’s but treat the lower die as the ‘tens’ for trained skills, and the higher die as the ‘tens’ for untrained skills. Or vice versa, if they needed to roll high. Which meant that they were able to, once in a while, succeed at something!
(which goes against the entire Warhammer ethos but still!)
(Oh hi, Long Time Lurker First Time Poster, etc. Love your blog!)