In this installment of the two-part designer diary, I discuss several of the different elements that make up an action card, go into more detail on how recharge affects various actions, and provide a look at the anatomy of an action card. Don't forget to download the PDF that provides the anatomy of an action card!

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=876

Wow, information overload! In a good way, though!

I think it's *very* interesting on the various ways to reduce recharge. I am quite curious as to how many Fortune points the players will have access to during a session, both personal and group pools.

I am not sure I like that increased degrees of success are not accounted for by the rules. Granted, it's probably unlikely that a Test will have more than 3 success symbols more than challenge symbols, so it might not come up often. I'll certainly house rule something should that (or the reverse) situation come up, however. I think I'll need to see how often it can occur, perhaps adding the effects of the lesser and major together ... or it might just need to be situation dependent.

Anyway, some very nice information ... and a lot of it. Thanks *very* much Jay (and everyone at FFG-WFRP) for providing these background and design diaries.

One of the subtle but significant perspective shifts is "what is the best roll I can achieve?"

In previous editions, if you play with degrees of success, then a 01 is the best roll you can achieve.

In d20 based games, a natural 20 is the best result you can achieve.

So what makes the best possible roll in WFRP3? It's not a roll that generates the most successes it's the roll that gets the most out of your action. A roll with 6 successes and zero boons on an action that has a 3 success line is actually a less desirable roll than a roll with 3 successes and 3 boons. There are actually two axes to measure success the binary succeed/fail line, and the side effect line.

This is another factor when determining your stance, whether or not to spend fortune points, and which actions to use. Conceptually, to really achieve the "best" result, you want a number of successes equal to the highest success line, with as many boons as possible to trigger some side effects.

The fact that excess successes don't have a tangible result helps illustrate that there's a balancing act, a walk along the razor's edge, trying to satisfy two different goals within each roll sure you want to succeed (at least 1 success symbol), but when you do, you want to succeed with style (boons).

Ahh! I hadn't thought of it that way. It is a very interesting point. It is true that looking at it from that perspective, needing two types of symbols to achieve "best" success is something fairly different. So, rather than trying to add the most dice with the most success symbols, players will need to balance those with success symbols and those with boon symbols, to get the best results from their rolls. Very interesting! Thanks for pointing this out!

Great article. I really appreciated getting some insight behind why you guys decided to go with a card mechanic. I'd definitely like to see more design theory stuff in future articles. Still not convinced I'm onboard for the whole action card idea, but learning about the "Stunt" option certainly made me feel more optimistic about the game. Also, I had been under the impression that all actions were covered by some sort of action card in the game, and this article seemed to say that wasn't the case. Perhaps in a future article you could discuss all the game actions that aren't tied to cards in more detail? Thanks again for the writeup!

While I like the mechanic in general, I was concerned that Action Cards would be restrictive to creativity, and while I still think that there will be those who are "ruled by the cards" regardless, this design diary sets my mind a bit more at ease.

It looks very much like those with creative solutions will have their options as well!

So in the case of non-card actions, I assume it's usually a skill roll. Player describes what they are trying to do and the player and GM decide which skill is relevant. Is it up to the GM to determine the outcome based on number of successes plus any boons/banes (possibly with guidance from the GM book) or is the Stunt card always the default card when no other action card applies?

mac40k said:

A diary on skills and their use would be good. And an explanation on why some character who trains the Guile skill can't do the Honeyed Words action ? What is the Guile skill used for, if it's most useful aspects are converted into action cards that one must also buy ? Doesn't that make the skill seemingly less useful until you spend extra for the related actions ?

If I use WS as an example, this skill has basic actions available to everybody, namely a standard melee strike. Do the other skills also come with a basic action of the sort ?

Among all other things on what I have some doubts, here it is the most that make me think:

success and failure.

In the first posts most people talked about the possibility of different results over success/failure and how d100 mechanics were limited in this regard.
How we can telling the story much better, since I'll know if I succeeded by fortune/skill/whatever.

From these DD all that I came across is: success/failure.

I'm not sure that these skills will be so clearly polarized into success or failure, depending on the dice results.

By the look of things, you can end up with no successes, but still get a Boon or two which grants you other possibilites, like a free manoeuver or whatever.

I'm sure that a clever GM can impose their own version of Boons and Banes with the percentile system, but in my experience some players felt that this was "fudging" with the rules.

DeathFromAbove said:

Really? Cause the norm that I'm seeing is that the following are possible results for most tests:

Failure

Failure + Bane

Failure + Boon

Success

Success + Boon

Success + Bane

There are usually Critical successes as well (with the possible Banes and Boons) and some actions have critical Banes or Critical Boons. So most actions have 9 possible outcomes. Now v2 typically had 8 possible outcomes, but those were all degrees of success or failure (and it rarely mattered what degree you got for most rolls). You could also only get 1 result in a dice roll, as opposed to the norm in v3 which is 1 or 2 (success alone or success + boon, for example).

Don't forget, number of successes sometimes also matter, and sometimes the number of boons/banes also matter and give different effects.

And don't forget about "chaos star" and "Sigmar's comet" signs that trigger even more effects and can occur at the same time with boons/banes.

Great question...

Many have already given good insight i would like to add the following..

That the card mechanic is awesome because success is not just a matter of hit and miss and that is something this system nails i love that....

This means as a dm i can right stories and it adds some options as the story unfolds...

Its going to be excellent as they release more add ons for this marvellous system..