The purple dice are to add a difficulty rating....the black dice are misfortune

can someone give me an example of when you would add more purple difficulty dice in combat over the black misfortune dice?

help is appreciated

Challenges:
Simple: <0>
Easy: <P>
Average: <PP>
Hard: <PPP>
Daunting: <PPPP>

i understand that there are difficulty levels...but in the combat section it only talks about adding the black dice to adjust the pool. for example if you are fighting on a muddy field the GM would add misfortune dice not a purple die...

are there circumstances that would raise the challenge (purple) level of attacks 9 the default level is easy according to the rules)

I think that in general you wouldnt add a purple die - unless the card called for an extra purple de to be rolled.

On p58 it says "The GM may decide the action in question is better served as an unopposed or opposed check"

I've taken that to mean, for me, any time the opponent is giving his attention to the particular attack, then the check is opposed and so the challenge is based on the defender's stat (usually Ag).

monkeylite said:

Woah... Good luck to the PC who's fighting an opponent with Agility 4... Or even 3 for that matter...

Necrozius said:

I don't mean that you use the Ag as a Challenge level. I just mean you compare the Str (say) to the Ag as an opposed test, to find the Challenge level.

I think it's important for people to realize the effect of adding certain dice to the mix. I am not sure if this has been covered else where, and I apologize if it has been.

For this I am going to use the number of expected successes / challenges for each given dice. Expected Values are calculated p(event)*degree-of-event. So for example <C> has 0.75 challenges expected per dice. A <P> has two faces with two challanges and two faces with one challenge, or 2 * 2/8 + 1 * 2/8 = 0.75.

• Stance Dice <S> => 0.7 success
• Characteristic => 0.5 success

So a normal attack with a Strength 3, Stance 1 character would be 1.7 success (0.7 + 0.5 * 2) and 0.75 challenges for a net total of 0.95 successes. So this is likely to succeed. Adding another <P> dice though, would yield 1.5 challenges, which would net 0.2 success. Making this unlikely to succeed. Opposed to adding a dice would yield 1.08 challenges and net roughly 0.7 success, so still likely to succeed.

I think that the game suggests adding over <P> to the pool because of the greater effect that a <P> dice has on the over all outcome. This is also not considering the additional likelihood of rolling Chaos Marks, which are only found on <P> dice.

Um... a target's defense (from armor, Actions, etc...) typically adds to an attacker's dice pool... correct?

zelbone said:

Doesn't it need to be >1 successes to be likely to succeed?

monkeylite said:

I guess that depends on your definition of "likely".

>1 successes means more likely to succeed than fail that is true. But at 0.95 I would state that a character still has a reasonable chance at success, even if he is more likely to fail than succeed.

The default difficulty for a melee or ranged attack is <P>.
Certain attack actions add <P> representing a more difficult maneuver. Execution Shot, for example, adds a <P> if the user wants to gain a second Melee Strike attack. In general, a GM should only be adding . However, if the GM thinks that an action is, for some reason, inherently more difficult in a particular instance, they can adust the difficulty. My best example, I think, would be if a PC specifically targets a small area of a foe.

for example, as a GM, IMO:
If the dwarf trollslayer is fighting a Giant and plays his TrollFeller Strike. The player states that he specifically wants to strike the Giant's unarmored head. Due to the height difference and the specific location being targeted, I might actually add a <P> to the difficulty of the attack, but if the attack lands I'd ignore the Giant's soak (since its head is unarmored). The action itself is more difficult, because the Trollslayer is aiming solely for a specific target on the opponent, and one that is much more difficult to reach.

Remember, represent a wide variety of environmental difficulties, like rain, mud, darkness, fatigue, stress, etc. <P> relate to the maneuver itself, so should be fairly constant.

zelbone said:

Ok, I mis-typed this reply. But I think it went too long so I can no longer edit, so I apologize for the post-spamming.

"Likely" and "more likely" imply something being more or less probable. These values are not really meant to answer the question of how probable something is. The values are meant to measure probabilistic outcomes over time. Looking at a <R> dice, if I rolled 10 of them. I would expect 7 successes, on 5 faces. This is because a <R> has a 50% of not rolling a success, and if it does roll a successful face, it could generate either 1 or 2 successes. If I rolled 10 <G> dice I would expect 7 successes on 7 faces, since <G> can only generate a max of 1 success on any given face.

The trouble is, expectation value doesn't actually tell you all that much about things you actually care about.

Let's take a simple example to show how it can be deceptive: I introduce a new type of die. 6 sided, with 1 hammer on each of two sides, and the other 4 sides are blank. The expected value of this new pink die is 1/3. That means if you roll 3 of them, you "expect" to get 1 hammer. What do we mean by that? Well, at face value, it sounds like 3 dice is the point when you're more likely to roll 1 hammer than not, right? But actually, you have about a 70% chance to roll at least 1 hammer. In fact, if you only roll 2 dice, with an expectation value of 2/3 of a hammer, you're still more likely to roll at least 1 hammer than not!

The moral: Math will lie to you.

Chipacabra said:

Math doesn't lie. It's just a matter of understanding what math is telling you.

In your example above:

• 0 - hammers = 30%
• 1 - hammers = 44.4%
• 2 - hammers = 22.2 %
• 3 - hammers = 3.7 %

Broken down like this you can see that the most likely event in fact 1 hammer. Which is all that Expected values tell you. What is the most likely event. Expected values for multiple events (in this case dice) are also easier for people to quickly calculate compared to probabilities.