When I talent states to remove a setback dice from your check. What is there are no setback dice on the check what do you do?

You wish they would've added some additional feature to that Talent....

GMs need to recognize to put value on those Talents Setbacks need to be used liberally. In addition as the game progresses to more advanced challenges, Setbacks become more common place and the Talent grows in value.

When I talent states to remove a setback dice from your check. What is there are no setback dice on the check what do you do?

Technically nothing happens. It's up to the gm to apply setbacks liberally so those talents have weight.

This is one of the mistakes I made when running my first campaign. My players kept throwing all their XP into skills and ignoring talents for the most part and I realized by the third or fourth session I needed to start adding more setback dice. Needless to say, they started looking a lot harder at those talents when XP was awarded again.

a rule of thumb I use at my table, is that those talents add 1 boost for every 2 ranks (rounded up) if I fail to give at least 1 setback to a roll. This helps me remember to add them.

Never been a problem at my table. I can't remember ever not having been able to think of at least one reason for setback dice on any given check. My players always get that smugly satisfied look on their face when I say "Make an Average [something] check with 2 setback dice" and they get to say, "I just ignore those setback dice".

it is not that I cannot think of things to add, it is that I usually forget to add them as I run short sessions (3 hours) due to the FLGS that we play at hours

My players with those talents make a habit of staring me in the eye as I state the difficulty of the check, picking up the black dice when I tell them how many setbacks are on the check, and then flippantly tossing said setbacks aside the instant I am done talking.

it is not that I cannot think of things to add, it is that I usually forget to add them as I run short sessions (3 hours) due to the FLGS that we play at hours

Yeah that was my problem, I was still learning and just never remembered to add them. It was funny how annoyed my players were when I started adding in those setback dice because they had noway to remove them and actually started missing shots or important one chance checks. At the end of that session talents became better investments.

My players with those talents make a habit of staring me in the eye as I state the difficulty of the check, picking up the black dice when I tell them how many setbacks are on the check, and then flippantly tossing said setbacks aside the instant I am done talking.

Lol!

A general guide for GM's is:

Try and decide how hard they want a task to be - simple to impossible.

Reduce that difficulty by 1

Add 1-3 Setback to compensate for the reduced difficulty.

It's not very Narrative to think about it like that, but it's a good place to start when new to the system.

Also an often overlooked concept is that the BASIC Difficulty for Initiative is Simple, but circumstances can Increase that Difficulty or add Setback.

You have to remember that the difficulty of a check doesn't change, need to jump over a 2 metre gap might be an average difficulty athletics check.

Doing it 5 feet of the ground , its still average, with a running jump its average with a boost, doing so 500 feet of the ground its average with one dice upgraded because the stakes are higher and the potential for disastrous failure is there, ie despair.

With a running start its a boost and a setback. In windy conditions add another setback. Doing the same thing in gale force winds you are looking at another upgrade, add rain in and you have yet another setback from the slippery conditions.

All of the above while getting shot at, upgrade it again (now making this a hard check),

Tbe difficulty of the check never changed because the task at it's most simplistic level never changed (although it did eventually get upgraded to a hard check, this is still technically an upgraded average check though), you are still jumping a 2 metre gap.

Circumstances allow you as a GM to change things, this gives players the chance to use those talents , it also allows them to use the narrative system to its full because they can do the following-

Roll advantage(s) on a previous roll- the rain slackens or wind calms long enough for them to make the jump (remove a setback) , the rain and wind blows in such a way as to obscure the player somewhat from the shooters ,(downgrading one of the reds back to purple) ,or the wind calms entirely (removing the other upgrade). Roll a triumph and the wind holds steady for the next player or when the trooper stands up to shoot he loses grip on his weapon and now has to take 2 maneuvers to recover his weapon (one to move ,and another to pick up the weapon again).

So not only do these conditions inform the check, and allow the player to use whatever talents they have spent xp on , but also informs them of what narrative shenanigans they can pull off. Similarly it allows you as GM to decide what narrative results threat or despair cause.

Failure - you don't make the jump, but neither are you emperilled by it

Threat, this us where the reason for the setback dice come up you slip while making the jump, causing strain dmg with enough threat, you may even suffer a critical as your landing was that bad

Despair- this is where the real problems begin, the upgrades came about becuase you were being shot at, because of the wind and because you are 500 ft up, so despair causes, 1/ you get shot by one of troopers 2/ the wind is so strong you are blown and slip off course and land somewhere other than intended leaving you in greater peril.

Double despair, this is bad all of the things stacked against you cause you to plummet to the ground, perhaps if the gm is lenient allowing to to make further checks to grab a ledge or whatever hand holds may be near.

All of these are informed by the situation so not only are you giving players reason to take talents, but also giving the potential narrative results from any dice used in the check. So do yourself a favor, remember that checks aren't made in a vacuum (figuratively). Pretty much all the checks I call are made in some form of adverse circumstance, otherwise why make the check, given time even many hard checks can be overcome. The risks rarely come from the checks themselves.

Yeah, it's a common mistake of GMs new to the system to instead increase the base difficulty of a task rather than adding setback dice. Especially true if the GM has a lot of experience with running more traditional RPGs where they've been trained to adjust the base difficulty via situational modifiers.

I like Richardbuxton's suggestion, as it's a decent set of training wheels until the GM gets a better feel for how to adjust the difficulty of a task by means of setback and boost dice instead of altering the number of difficulty dice.

I think another hangup GMs can get into is adjusting the Difficulty of a roll based on a PC's ranks in Skills and Characteristics.

"This would be easy for a person with 3 yellow dice on that check."

"This would be almost impossible for someone who is untrained."

Of course this isn't unique to this system, but since we have the ability to throw another axis of success/failure into the mix it makes for a more complex thought experiment.