Suppose I have a Politico. Said Politico wishes to get through a door. This door is guarded by a single Rival. The Politico chooses to use Deception to convince the Rival to leave his post. The Rival has a Willpower of 3, no ranks in Discipline, and Nobody's Fool 2, which upgrades the difficulty of incoming Deception checks by 2.

The Politico really wants this check to work, so she went into this using her Signature Ability: Unmatched Expertise. She's bought it up a bit, but not all the way. As it currently stands, she can reduce the difficulty of Colonist Career skills by 2.

Now, with that Rival's Willpower of 3 (and 0 ranks in Discipline), the base difficulty is 3 Purples. Thanks to Nobody's Fool 2, the Rival would normally upgrade that to 2 Reds, 1 Purple. However, with the Politico reducing difficulty, what happens first? What should the final difficulty dice pool look like?

The CRB lays out in order how dice pools are assembled. Just look at the rules.

You reduce difficulty before upgrading it. The final dice pool would be 1 Challenge die, 1 Difficulty die.

5 hours ago, awayputurwpn said:

You reduce difficulty before upgrading it. The final dice pool would be 1 Challenge die, 1 Difficulty die.

Is this really right? The Edge of the Empire Core Book says:

"Sometimes abilities will call for both dice upgrades
and downgrades. When this occurs, all upgrades are
applied first. Then, any downgrades are applied This
is important, since upgrading dice could potentially
add more dice to the overall pool."

So the dice would first be upgraded to 2 Reds, 1 Purple. Then downgraded to 3 Purple.

As I understand it.

Reducing is different to downgrade. Downgrade can never change the total number of dice, but reducing changes the base difficulty. In this case the difficulty goes from Hard to Easy before the two upgrades are applied.

DC is the pool

6 hours ago, Laddeus said:

Is this really right? The Edge of the Empire Core Book says:

"Sometimes abilities will call for both dice upgrades
and downgrades. When this occurs, all upgrades are
applied first. Then, any downgrades are applied This
is important, since upgrading dice could potentially
add more dice to the overall pool."

So the dice would first be upgraded to 2 Reds, 1 Purple. Then downgraded to 3 Purple.

As I understand it.

Verbiage is critical. Reduce, Increase, Downgrade, Upgrade, are synonyms in the English language, they don't mean the same thing in dice mechanics.