3 hours ago, Randy G said:

It's a "should be". Except in the cases of opposed checks, anything beyond Formidable difficulty is listed as impossible. So it's not RAW, house ruled, or Devs answered. It's an agreed upon interpretation.

Agreed upon by who and where, because that sounds like a house rule to me, and one me and the other person who also GMs in the group I play in happen to also agree with, but I wondered if there had been a dev response on it. The difference between an 8 purple check and 3 red 2 purple is enough to make a difference. GGPPRRR has an 8.6% chance of success, against 8 purple it is about half that (roughly for estimates sake1 in 12 vs 1 in 20.

Would also come into play with modding, where there are many attachments with enough potential mods to put you well over 5 difficulty dice.

The Devs once answered that in repond to the mechanics check, that you best should Upgrade the difficulty once the (soft) cap of 5 is reached, or 6 if you want the players to spend a DP

otherwise more than 6 purple may occur often with the mass battle rules.

Yes, and as always, the answer you are referring to was answered with a "at the GM's discretion, generally I would recommend" upgrading beyond difficulty 5, or something along those lines. Hence the agreed upon interpretation (at least at my table), not a hard RAW.

Plus, I like it that way. More Despairs to have fun with dispite success. But no, I havn't found a "Must do it this way" in regards to Fear.

On 7/22/2017 at 11:53 PM, Randy G said:

It's a "should be". Except in the cases of opposed checks, anything beyond Formidable difficulty is listed as impossible. So it's not RAW, house ruled, or Devs answered. It's an agreed upon interpretation.

The devs have stated (on everyone's favorite podcast that no one listens to) that 6 dice on either side is about where game balance starts to break down. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the jist of their reasoning for capping characteristics and skills where they did.

That being said, I would tend to agree with you, because of two things:

1, I like Despairs

2, I see the Difficulty of Fearsome's Fear check as its own thing, rather than a Fear check that starts as Easy and then is acted upon by more ranks in the talent. So following best practices of difficulties above "Formidable," I don't have a problem upgrading the remainder after 5.

Bottom line, it keeps the pools manageable and interesting. But if there is ever a point where 7 or 8 Difficulty dice would be considered "interesting," then I would roll with it

I try to keep the base difficulty to 5, with base 6 reserved for beyond impossible checks like the epic tractor beam or resisting a fear check against Aboleth. Now that doesn't mean the difficulty has to stay at that level. A +1 for auto-fire, +2 or 3 for trying to do a ricochet shot if it is possible, getting significant upgrades difficulty, etc.

Strangely enough the answer I got from the question was incomplete, as I was advised as they were placed in 3 different trees in 3 different careers and that it wouldnt come up often that the player could buy round the ranks once they got that high (but no answer on what would happen if they do). Personally I wouldnt make a character like this (5 tops maybe from Warden/X) but I've known a few that would. I personally prefer upgrades myself as rolling 6 dice gets silly.

Lol, gotta love Dev responses. "Err, maybe."

4 hours ago, Randy G said:

Lol, gotta love Dev responses. "Err, maybe."

Late 90s saw GW customer service giving out rules answers that were total asspulls. When we needed an answer we always called three times and took the best two-out-of three.