both die have 7 successes, the green die has 3 boons 0 banes, the red has 3 boones 2 banes. red has 2 exert, green has 2 delay.

assuming exert = delay the green die comes out ahead by 2 boons right?

are the red sides of the action cards any better (or worse) than the green cards?

Am I noticinga discrepancy that doesnt really exist?

Yes, the red sides of the cards generally have a little more 'oomph' to them. A lot of the melee red cards have more damage. So, you pay for that extra potential with a higher chance to botch the roll.

Exhaustion gives stress/fatigue, and delay allows the GM to place extra recharge tokens on your action cards (I usually go for the throat and take out block/parry/dodge cards).

There are times when either stance is a good choice, and I have a lot of players that hover around neutral so they can flip over fast if they need to.

NezziR said:

It seems an odd choice to put them in a LESS defensive position, given that they are intentionally being "conservative" as opposed to "reckless".

Pyske said:

I know right? But I'm just mean like that.

I justify it by saying they spent so much time concentrating on what they were doing they can't effectively defend. They get their conservative payoff by not rolling banes on the conservative dice. I can be a harsh GM

Edit: It's also a good tool if you find a player relying too much on a single zero recharge card. Forces them to switch it up a bit.

Kaptain O said:

There are times where either is better than the other, but speaking very generally (IMO):

Delay is worse than Fatigue/Stress, Reckless is better for Melee, and Conservative is better for Missile fire.

Funny, my players all felt the fatigue was worse than the delay.

Kaptain O said:

Well, people are going to have different experiences, of course. Especially when none of us have played the game very much we're going to end up with very little consensus. It just seemed with most of our situations that having your key Action Card delayed two more turns was worse than fatigue since you could move out of the reckless stance and Assess the Situation to combat fatigue.

But anyway, how much better is the game with all the tactical decisions available to the players, as opposed to: "Well, I didn't roll a 35 or less, again. . . Oh, rolled a 33 this time; oh, he dodged?. . . Ok, rolled a 47, another miss. . . Uh, rolled a 74. . . hmmm, rolled a 92. . ."

If you actually play that way, I cant see the system being any different after the newness wares off. Its not a failing of the system, its the way you play.

To me, the red dice is a 'high risk, high reward' dice. It has more blanks and more penalties than the green dice, but the successes are mostly 2 successes, or even a success with a boon, something the green dice doesn't have. So you can go with green, and be quite certain that you'll get some successes, or go for broke and go red, and either get tons of successes, or choke and roll up loads of bane and exertions. Red has a more gamble element to it.

If you want to do rediculus damage then reckless dice are where its at.

Its not really fair to just count success and boons. The red die also features such things as doube sucess, double boon, and the success and boon result. Wheres a green die will never generate more than one success.

Loswaith said:

This new system is better. The previous system did not fail. I play good.

Basicly, saying something is better than another something does not mean the observer who is offering his personal opinion on something the first and something the second is neccessarily saying that the first something failed.

Also, the mechanics and system are critical to the enjoyment of any game. Otherwise there would be no gaming industry, we would all sit around roleplaying and resolving challenges by seeing who can spit the furthest. Afterall, if you don't draw enjoyment from that system, then you are simply playing it wrong.

Then why use that example of gameplay, as it portays a totaly different way to how you actually do it and is simply being derogatory for no reason other than to be derogatory.

Since you were discussing actions not dice rolling, previous editions do have a series of actions you can use tactically as well, and you dont have to pay XP to use those.

See this thread from EN World as to why making comments about editions or responding to them is pointless.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/266797-edition-war-flowchart.html

Now if we could return to the thread topic I am keen to understand as much as I can about the system to help me decide if I should buy it.

Loswaith said:

Well, I apologize then. Didn't mean to slam the old system as much as say how much better the new system is. I played the old systems for 22 years, and never thought they were bad. I wished for more tactical options with the first, got them with the second, and wanted more since A2+ meant over 95% of all remaining combat rounds consisted of Swift Attack.

Anyway, in this version the dice pool used by a player attacking the same NPC with the same weapon will rarely be the same two rounds in a row, let alone 5 or 6. And this is HUGE.

Red/Reckless sides of cards tend to be more "powerful". For example, Channel Power will give the mage more Power. Attack action cards (generally) will have more +damage.

Also, a T4/5 fighter is much less inconvenienced by fatigue than a T2/3 character, especially early in combat, so gaining a few fatigue isn't as much of a negative, whereas adding recharge to a card or losing initiative can be pretty significant.

So, there's good and bad to both stances, and I don't know that one is particularly better than another. It's mostly depends on your career and action cards. A trollslayer trying to use conservative stance in melee won't reach his full damage potential. An Elf envoy trying to use reckless probably won't win many friends during social encounters.

Boris Hochloff said:

Always using swift attack is not realy an issue of the system so much as the player. Personaly I mix up my characters moves and often use feint and manoeuver to alot greater effect than just trying to whack something two or three times. The swift attack issues realy didnt start rearing their head enough to get into the forums for a a year or two after the game came out.

To be honest the results will fade into oblivion and become the same once the newness wares off (once you have chalked up 100x the one effect it will become just as dull), however the cooldowns will force people to change actions round to round. Eventually players will set up a seemingly optimal pattern of actions anyway, and just loop them, causing the same effect as the swift attack issue, just over multiple rounds.

Loswaith said:

Loswaith, I will gladly give you the last word. I'll leave this conversation after this post (geez people; cheering , seriously?).

It doesn't matter if you thought "often" mixing up your characters moves with feint and manuever led to "alot [sic] greater effect" than using swift attack. The math does not bear that out. It's not even close when you get to A3 . Seriously, not even close .

Exactly how you define the phrase "the swift attack issues realy [sic] didnt [sic] start rearing their head" makes it possible that you are technically correct, but I seriously doubt it took the majority of the WFRP community more than three combat encounters to realise the mathematically irrefutable truth that using swift attack would be better in nearly every circumstance. But if you insist it took up to two years for people to understand this. . . well, so be it.

The fact is, that you must understand that swift attack was obviously the best tactical choice over, and over, and over again, because you then say the new system will devolve into players setting up a "seemingly optimal pattern of actions anyway. . . causing the same effect as the swift attack issue . . ."

Exactly what point are you making? Did you have one when you started typing, or were you just on an expedition into full-fledged contrarianist naivite?

Players who maximize actions to the point of developping action sequence routines that they then loop are really boring players that are out there to "win". In the old days we called them Hack'n'slashers. I'm not saying you are, I believe not, Loswaith. But saying that people using V3 will automatically eventually revert to that hack'n'slash way of using action cards is not true. Many players are like you and me and seek to tell the story first.

I also think that the math in V3 is harder to fathom because of the different dice, which means it will take a long while or some gifted statistician to determine which actions are "better" and when. Swift attack is an obvious choice, compared to that.

My sincere hope is that the V3 actions were well clculated and tested to make sure the underlying math is sound and gives logical results. By logical results, I mean that a skilled person should succeed easy tests almost all the time etc.

Loswaith said:

Which depending on the stance and what they roll on the dice, the GM will more than likely be able to add more recharge counters to various actions to mix it up a little.... so the point is really moot.

Besides, what you're talking about is a straight-up fight. I'm sure some talented GM's will come up with some very interesting combats that will mix up the monotony a lot.

Personally I think the tracks will help out a lot with this. While I don't want to toot my own horn (toot! toot!), I've got a fun combat rolling around inside my head right now using the track pieces for combat and I think my players will definitely enjoy the difficulty/randomness of such a combat

Wait, what? People think that the system mathematically penalizing you for not swift attacking every round doesn't make combat stale?

Make a combat system that rewards the type of behavior you want to see in a game.

Just because you can do things in a system that go against the system's logic to make things entertaining doesn't mean there wasn't a flaw in the system.