Hi folks

I'm beginning my rewrite of wfrpg 3 ed.

The current problem is the dice calculation...I'm no mathgeek...

Here are the crunch:

1 Chaos Star converts to 1 bane and 1 sword (Spellcasting not included)

Chaos and sigmar Cancel out

3 misfortune converts to 1 purple

Am i destroying the whole concept??

I think you are on the right track. Possibly discount the first red bane somehow.

Ahh to make reckless more attractive??

We have not had the same problem with the red dice...from the get go they all were in conservative stance...unless a roleplaying aspect "makes" them go reckless...we still consider reckless high Dam output...and its more a desperate gamble...

The reason behind the Chaos Star conversion was very simply that I was way to hard with my discription on the bad stuff...so now if they roll 2 Chaos Stars it fits better

Mathematically, a purple die falls between 2 and 3 black, much closer to 2 than to 3 so my initial instinct is to reject that part of your proposal. However, your proposed change to the chaos star (being both a failure and a bane) pretty much rebalances that so (in your system) 1 purple is much closer to 3 black and it should work.

The area where I think you'll have trouble though is the Chaos and Comet cancellation.

• For one thing, cancelling the chaos star sort of undoes the rebalancing of the purple that you just did. With both in the mix, 3 black is once again harder than 1 purple, provided the active character has at least 1 level of skill.
• Overall you'll be increasing success rate (and reducing the bane/chaos-star consequences) for high-Rank characters. These are characters who for the most part really don't need any further boosts because their dice pools are already huge.
• There are also a number of cards and situations where having both symbols on the same roll is really interesting (you achieve maximum effect with your spell but you also trigger a miscast; the orc crits you but also kills some of his henchmen; your momentum takes you over the cliff but you manage to grab a hold with one hand and are now dangling; etc). Making those symbols cancel out will eliminate some of the most interesting results in favor of the bland middle.

Ok thx r_b_bergstrom, good explanation...

Just to throw a wrench in there...we are overall dissatisified by the whole yellow and White dice regarding skills...imo if you are specialized you would be a lot better than a normal trained militta man...so we are considering a swap..

Trained gives 1 White, specialized gives 1 yellow (you Can now specialize more times in hand weapon...max equal to training in melee wp)

And dropping the whole specialize in your skill because you invested in it during your advance...pehaps giving 2 free relevant skill Increase insted

In the end i guess it makes the same Dicepool for a "fighter" type...but it makes a Big diffrent for char who need to bye non-career advances to get melee skill

Still i see you point in the cancellaction and Think we Will follow that

I think you are on the right track. Possibly discount the first red bane somehow.

Ahh to make reckless more attractive??

We have not had the same problem with the red dice...from the get go they all were in conservative stance...unless a roleplaying aspect "makes" them go reckless...we still consider reckless high Dam output...and its more a desperate gamble...

The problem Emirikol is alluding to is that when you analyze the math of it all, the green dice are much better than the red.

Green dice are more likely (than red) to achieve success in general, and less likely to have unwanted side-effects. That would be fine if the red dice had some reasonable advantage to balance it out, but in practice they really don't. Yes, red dice score more successes, but it's very rare that you need more than 3 successes so any beyond that are generally wasted. It mostly works out okay at Rank 1, but once the PCs have Skill 2 or a bunch of Fortune dice they no longer need the bonus successes. Even characters that benefit from the Red side of the card are usually better off going no deeper than 1 step into Reckless (provided there's at least 7 good dice in their pool). Once your players have done the math on that, the whole Stance mechanic loses its luster.

There is an optional rule in the GM's toolkit (+1 damage per extra success, capped by your skill ranks) that fixes that somewhat but only for attacks (and mostly just for high-Rank characters) and does so at the cost of increasing PC mortality. The "Enhance" cards from Omens of War and Hero's Call help a little as well (by reducing your dice pool for other benefits, thereby making the remaining red dice a little sexier) but again almost exclusively for attacks. The stars have to be just right for anyone to ever get a benefit from the second step of Reckless stance, especially outside of combat.

Emirikol's notion of reducing the downsides of the red die are interesting, but I'd be much happier if we instead accentuated the strengths of the red dice. Red should be the high-risk, high-reward option. As they stand, they're the high-risk, moderate reward option (and green are the low-risk, low-but-consistent-reward option). Ignoring the first bane would make them the low-risk, moderate-reward option... and I'm just not convinced that's really an improvement. I guess it technically is better than what we've got right now in terms of mathematics, but it makes the differences between the two die types less pronounced and less interesting.

And now we are getting crunchy :-)

I was thinking about converting 3 succeses to 1 boon...or pehaps 2-1...that would up the crit especially with the red yes??

And now we are getting crunchy :-)

I was thinking about converting 3 succeses to 1 boon...or pehaps 2-1...that would up the crit especially with the red yes??

Yes, technically it would, but I don't particularly like the way it does it. Mostly in that:

1. It would reduce the downside of the red dice, making them more like the green. Still probably an improvement, overall, but at the cost of a little bit of flavor. Ideally, you want red dice to have the best odds of scoring a big hit with a negative side effect, while green scores more modest hits but no banes. This change, like what Emirikol proposed, really just makes the two die types more similar.
2. It would invalidate a handful of Talent cards that do something similar (particularly if you use the the 2-to-1 conversion rate). Not a huge deal (especially if it's just 3 unused successes = +1 boon), but a minor knock against it. Mostly just an argument for 3-to-1 instead of 2-to-1.

As for the second part of what you said:

that would up the crit especially with the red yes??

Increasing crits all around isn't really a desirable thing in my opinon. Crits are something of a problem in that they really harm the heroes, but rarely inconvenience an NPC. Players mostly don't care much about inflicting crits because raw damage will usually drop the enemy long before the crit's printed penalty manages to cause them any hardship. There are exceptions (we had an upgraded Chaos Knight get dropped by two lucky back-to-back concussion cards a few sessions ago), but in general bonus crits aren't sexy to the players. (Other boon effects are, though, so maybe it's a net gain.)

Example: A huge percentage of existing crits are (comparatively) lame things like "+1 black on Fellowship checks". When that lands on an Orc, it's effectively nothing. That Orc will never roll anything but Strength. The GM doesn't usually care about how many days it takes the NPC to heal because the goal is for the Orc to provide a brief challenge in one scene and then die. That same crit on a PC, however, is much more meaningful and dire, both because they'll actually roll Fellowship, and also because PCs need to be mindful of healing rates and the dangers of getting enough crits to die or trigger the bottom half of a severe wound card.

You may want to check this excel file done some time ago by I don't remember who. It will allow you to do some maths. In this one I changed the comets to also count as successes, and in this one Comets count as successes and Chaos stars as failures. You can easily modify the excel to add remove effects, like chaos stars counting as banes too.

Thx a lot!!!

Regarding the crits...I was kinda thinking 3 ways of making them matter for npc aswell... (Pehaps both)

1. Those crits that don't have an actual in Combat effect...let the pc agument for an in Combat effect...-1 fellowship...that might be..."my axe glances of the helmet of the guard, cutting open the left brow, blood begins to seep Down in his eye"...add 1 White dice to attacks against the guard, the next severity number of times... Or somthing in that regard...

2. Max numbers of crits equal to toughness...regardless of wounds...(boss fights is like normal)

3 add the severity of the crits...when/if they exceed total wounds...last crit kills the NPC...

All the above to help the red dice gain potens (Exchange 3success to 1 boon)

One of my house rules concerning green dices: a hourglass result means decreasing your init rank by one (for the rest of the combat); this comes in addition to the +1 token.

One of my house rules concerning green dices: a hourglass result means decreasing your init rank by one (for the rest of the combat); this comes in addition to the +1 token.

I think it's actually +2 recharge tokens in RAW (and nasty enough you can put them on any action, not only on the action used by the player, even on actions that are not currently recharging. I love recharge on curry favour when the character meant to quick cast a blessing.)

I have gone a little further....bought a Black blank 8-sided dice, this Will be the initial dice for all except magic...

I was thinking on making the sides:

2 double swords

1 double banes

2 single swords

1 blank

2 bane and sword ( changed single bane and chaos star)

With the add-on that 3 misfortune converts to 1 (normal) challenge die, there is still chance of getting the Chaos Star so the effects on action cards Can trigger.

also regarding the reckless dice...enhance dam +1 (or 2) pr step deep in reckless...and no converting successes to boons but What to do out of Combat??

If you want a more balanced dice system, give a look to the Star Wars Edge of the Empire game, it may save you some time.

If you want a more balanced dice system, give a look to the Star Wars Edge of the Empire game, it may save you some time.

Hmm I have invested too much in wfrp dice to change them all...also I have no idea how eote works...