Hi all,

I am a relatively new player and I am trying to come to grasp with some parts of the system.

I am a bit confused with what happens when you use a talent (or signature ability) that reduces the difficulty of an action (not upgrade/downgrade) when this is made on an opposed check.

For example lets say that I have triggered the Unmatched Expertise signature ability (reduce difficulty of all skill checks by 1) and I am doing a coercion check against a character with Willpower 3 and 3 ranks in discipline.

What is the difficulty of the check and how exactly did you calculate it?

Thanks in advance!

This was my first post so it took a while to be approved.

Meanwhile it has gotten to the 2nd page without an answer so I am giving it a bump.

This isn't covered in the book, but I would treat it like any other check: set the difficulty, increase, decrease, upgrade, downgrade, add, then subtract.

For your example, the difficulty before your ability is 3 (Willpower) with 3 upgrades (Discipline). So we take the base difficulty of 3 and reduce it to 2, then apply 3 upgrades, giving us a total difficulty of 2 Challenge and 1 Difficulty.

It might be more demonstrative if we made the numbers different. Let's say our target has only 2 Willpower, but 4 Discipline. In this case the difficulty is 4 (the larger number; remember, difficulty is the total number of dice) with 2 upgrades, so we'd reduce it to 3 and 2, giving us the same dice pool as before, but this time a die actually went away.

Now, once you get the upgrade that lets you decrease the difficulty by two, let's look at our examples again. They would both end up with a pool of 2 Challenge (3-2=1, upgraded 3 times; 4-2=2, upgraded 2 times).

The alternative method you could use for this to make it a bit easier is to simply calculate the roll by reducing the higher number (characteristic or skill) by the correct amount and building the defense pool in the normal manner. It's mostly the same, but does give some weird edge results. For instance, using the upgrade method and your example, when you have two decreases you go from rolling against 3 Challenge to rolling against 2, while if you use the skill method you go from rolling against 3 Challenge to rolling against 1 Challenge and 2 Difficulty. Your choice on which is better for your group.

Thanks a lot for your answer!

Makes sense.

Increasing (or decreasing) the difficulty would be adding or subtracting a purple.

Upgrading the difficulty would be turning one of those purple into a red.

So, the way we played it when my Politico was throwing around Unmatched Expertise, lets say that I'm schmoozing a guard, and he has two ranks of discipline and a three in Willpower. Without the Unmatched Expertise in play, there is a base of three purples and two of those get upgraded into reds.

Now, with Unmatched Expertise my difficulty of three is reduced by two - there is one purple. That purple gets upgraded to a red. Thus that's my difficulty.

So - establish baseline difficulty, upgrade the dice. Pretty easy if you follow the flow.

Increasing (or decreasing) the difficulty would be adding or subtracting a purple.

Upgrading the difficulty would be turning one of those purple into a red.

So, the way we played it when my Politico was throwing around Unmatched Expertise, lets say that I'm schmoozing a guard, and he has two ranks of discipline and a three in Willpower. Without the Unmatched Expertise in play, there is a base of three purples and two of those get upgraded into reds.

Now, with Unmatched Expertise my difficulty of three is reduced by two - there is one purple. That purple gets upgraded to a red. Thus that's my difficulty.

So - establish baseline difficulty, upgrade the dice. Pretty easy if you follow the flow.

The second upgrade should have resulted in a new purple being added back in.

Whoops! You're right - I got the math slightly wrong. Still, pretty close!