In order to activate an "Active" item quality you need to generate a set amount of advantages while also succeeding on a combat roll.

Sounds fine, except today the rule was really aggravating.

We were playing a chase scene where the players were fleeing from some NPCs. Both players and NPCs were using standard airspeeders, however the NPCs had mounted an Electromagnetic Harpoon on their airspeeder, with Ensnare 5.

The NPC gunner shoots, get 4 successes, no advantages. Meaning the harpoon hit the PCs airspeeder, but couldn't activate the ion/stun effect. When the NPCs gunners next turn came around, his only real option was to remove the harpoon (the airspeeders were tethered together the entire previous round) and try again, 5 success and no advantage.

At this point I feel that the entire point of the Electromagnetic harpoon is completely void, simply due to the fact that it requires advantages to work. The gunner succeeds beautifully each and every time he shoots, but the game mechanics hinder his true goal from accomplishing.

Anyone have any input on how to handle/houserule these kind of situations?

Does he have skill for Yellow dice with the weapon? Did he Aim? Did you spend DP and upgrade the attack? If you did all that and didn't get any uncancelled Advantages, sometimes them's the breaks.

He was rolling YYGB (Proficiency, Proficiency, Ability, Boost), boost from aiming. Didn't feel the need to flip destiny points as I assumed two proficiency dies would be enough, but no fish.

What Difficulty?

If you want something to happen, and you don't want to metagame it, you need to pull out all the stops. That's ok also if it's not going to be a kill shot on a player it's no big deal. If disabling their speeder is a necessary plot point then it might be better to just make it happen. In 'Under the Black Sun' you just start out having tripped alarms in a hacking job, there's no rolling, so it isn't like that's completely taboo or something.

That's another fine use for a Destiny Point, but not to upgrade the dice pool. If the need for an outcome is essential, it's perfectly okay to flip one and declare a fact, per page 28's "Luck and Deus Ex Machina" section. I don't allow this all the time, but sometimes the dice aren't in the same story we are and things need to happen.

I feel your pain. When I was using scathing Tirade I would get nothing but successes. Sure, I could hit 5 bad guys, which there were never enough in range, but I couldn't do more than 1 or 2 damage to one of them because I couldn't roll advantages to save my life. It's the most frustrating thing about the dice system, bit it's something you just have to learn to deal with. Double sucks in your example because they just couldn't turn on the whole reason for using that weapon. Just like the Shock Gloves. You can slap someone around all day long and wonder if you put batteries in the **** things because you never roll two advantages to turn them on.

I really wish there was a mechanic to convert success to advantages. Maybe at a 2 to 1 rate and/or expending a destiny point?

What Difficulty?

If disabling their speeder is a necessary plot point then it might be better to just make it happen. In 'Under the Black Sun' you just start out having tripped alarms in a hacking job, there's no rolling, so it isn't like that's completely taboo or something.

That's another fine use for a Destiny Point, but not to upgrade the dice pool. If the need for an outcome is essential, it's perfectly okay to flip one and declare a fact, per page 28's "Luck and Deus Ex Machina" section. I don't allow this all the time, but sometimes the dice aren't in the same story we are and things need to happen.

Well I am trying to run a game without GM fiat, meaning that there was no "essential" outcome, if things don't go the way I want then I just roll with it. However in this scenario I really WANTED this to happen, as I had some pretty good scenarios at hand if I succeeded. And it's not like I didn't come prepared, the gunner who was shooting had great stats and succeeded on everything he wanted to, except for the silly rules.

I really wish there was a mechanic to convert success to advantages. Maybe at a 2 to 1 rate and/or expending a destiny point?

I think you have arrived at the corner of rock and hard place. To me if what you had planned was great then I see no reason to not just make it happen and not worry about dice.

Sometimes, dice rolls go that way. It's the nature of the hobby, and with this system's dice being set up as they are, there are going to be cases where you wind up with more Advantages than you'd possibly need on one roll, and a gaggle of successes when what you really wanted were some Advantages.

I've seen dice rolls where the dice pool was enough to completely crush the difficulty... only for nearly all the positive dice to come up blank. Heck, had an incident in the game I was in last night where a PC was rolling 2 yellow, 2 green, and 2 boost vs. 2 purple... and only got a single success from one of the boost die because all the other positive dice came up blank and the difficulty dice both came up Threats.

As the player, it can be aggravating, but the same can be said for any RPG where the player has the awesome action in mind, gives a really cool description that sets it up, makes their dice roll... and fails the check. How many D&D games have had the party beatsticks roll a natural 1 when they really needed to roll a natural 20? I'm sure there have been plenty of Fudge/FATE game where the player needed to roll lots of of pluses but wound up with a bunch of minuses instead.

Now, per page 13 of the core rulebook, a Triumph can also be spent to trigger a weapon quality, so there is that, although by RAW the Triumph would simply convey one activation of the weapon quality, no matter how many Advantage would be required for a single activation. Which admittedly is a little on the weak side of things for something like a Triumph, but there it is. So if you need to trigger the Blast quality and you've got a Triumph, then you're good to go.

While the suggestion of letting a player flip a Destiny Point to activate a weapon quality is a tempting one, I'd strongly suggest against it. The main reason being that it makes activating weapon qualities almost a given, especially for characters that are rolling three or more proficiency dice.