Had this crop up in the game tonight, and I had no idea how this would play out.

Lets say you have the Reduce Difficulty upgrade for Unmatched Expertise, and you are rolling against a difficulty of 1 purple and 2 red dice. Which dice are removed first? Do you roll against the one purple or the one red?

I wound up rolling against the Red, but I was wondering how others would rule that.

Had this crop up in the game tonight, and I had no idea how this would play out.

Lets say you have the Reduce Difficulty upgrade for Unmatched Expertise, and you are rolling against a difficulty of 1 purple and 2 red dice. Which dice are removed first? Do you roll against the one purple or the one red?

I wound up rolling against the Red, but I was wondering how others would rule that.

If it says "Reduce Difficulty", then you start by figuring out the base difficulty before the upgrades are being applied. So, in your case it sounds like a base difficulty of 3 with 2 upgrades, hence 1P 2R as your final result. So, the 3P becomes 2P and then you add the upgrades, making it 2R.

Just a followup, if it was Downgrade... then 1P 2R would become 2P 1R.

It's not a downgrade - Unmatched Expertise says reduce the difficulty - instead of a Hard roll, it's an average roll, that bit I understand. And it was an opposed check (a negotiation against someone with two ranks on their side), so it was never purples to be upgraded to begin with.

... so it was never purples to be upgraded to begin with.

Yes, it was upgraded by the target's two skill ranks (or the attribute of two). Basically Kallabeca is saying you figure it out the same way you figure out the dice pool for a skill: larger number (attribute or skill ranks) is the number of purples and is the base difficulty, upgraded by the smaller number. I would agree in this case you suppress the larger number, which means dropping the purple.

Not sure how that would hold up if the base and upgrades were the same, ie: two reds. Using the method above would result in the equivalent of a downgrade, not a reduction, because you'd end up with RP. So probably a better rule of thumb is to remove purples first.

I'd interpret it as starting from the last die and working down. It -is- a Signature Ability that can only be activated once per session and costs a lot of XP to get. I'd let it be as powerful as possible (and removing dice is always more powerful than changing them).

I'd also remove a Difficulty die to start, and if there was none left, I'd downgrade a Challenge die to a Difficulty die like many of the responses offered.

It becomes RR. The original pool was 3 dice, regardless of whether they are R or P, the ability reduces that # to a pool of 2. Difficulty upgrades are then applied to the remaining dice pool, so RR.

In the case of a pool that was RR, it's the same thing, the dice pool was 2 dice, of which two were then upgraded. The ability would reduce the difficulty dice pool to one die, that would then have two upgrades to the difficulty resulting in a PR dice pool.

Playing for awhile allows for habits to form and shortcuts to be created when creating difficulty pools.

Always start with the base difficulty. This is the number of purple dice. If it is an opposed check, it is whichever is higher between characteristic or skill. This is when the difficulty is reduced.

Then apply all upgrades. This includes the lower number between characteristic and skill when making an opposed check. Upgrade purples into reds one at a time. If you end up with all reds, add a purple. If you have more upgrades, that purple becomes red. Etc.

Then apply all downgrades. Red dice turn back into purple. Keep in mind though that you can never remove purple dice via downgrading. So if there were enough upgrades to add purples, you are stuck with those purples, even if your available downgrades exceeds the number of upgrades.