Jericho said:

Those kinds of tactics are still there, i think the GM just needs to be liberally adding dice to make the PC want to find them. I think Dvang has mentioned on a couple of threads that the ideal pool has some successes but also some boons, and when trying to work out the pool the PC should try to be ensuring he has dice that have a good chance of generating both. unfortunately, the dice are random and none of them are particularly better at generating boons compared to successes than any other. If anything that's the problem with the mechanics, but its not easily fixed.. a way of converting successes into boons perhaps?

There are certainly times when it is better to not attack and add dice to someone elses pool as part of your action, especially if those dice you add result in an extra boon or two, which can be used to perform a critical. Unfortunately, you can't really guarantee those extra dice have a better chance of coming up with a boon compared to a success.

The GM can choose to add in extra and <P> however s/he sees fit, so I'm not sure there is really a need to start changing the way damage etc is worked out compared to the RAW, to change the base chance to hit ratings; that's in the the hands of the GM in the first place.

I see what you're saying Jericho, point taken. I'm looking forward to testing it all out in action. I do like the idea of combatants wearing each other down quickly but I was also hoping that the crits would play a larger hindering role and show up more often. At least if I come away displeased with how the combats run Gallows is already well on his way with some good house rules! Good discussion folks...

donbaloo said:

I think you're right donbaloo. I don't think the system needs to changed (of course, to each their own and so on). An attack that succeeded for real is an attack that caused critical damage. That you get a high chance of causing wounds (by getting more successes than challenge symbols) is not really a problem in the system.

I see where Gallows and willmanx are coming from though. It is very different from 2e to be sure. But I never liked that about 2e, it's probably why the groups I played in 2e never progressed beyond 1-2 sessions. Combat was just too boring in my opinion.

Additionally I think the tools for making combat harder is already in the game. There is no reason why the NPC's couldn't be wearing heavy armor (or warpstone infused armor or whatever fits) that gives high soak values. Let the NPC's use the advanced active defense cards. Invent new active defense cards that give more purple dice (or other stuff like letting chaos stars count as 2 challenges). I think that these things are better to use than changing the entire combat mechanisms.

Using opposed rolls is fine I guess, but I think the comment in the rule book is more meant to let the GM know that opposed rolls can be used in some circumstances, not that you should use them for all combat rolls. Opposed rolls also has the problem that combat becomes very hard if you're worse than your opponent. But I guess that can be solved by careful scaling of encounters. I suspect it's harder to construct encounters of the right challenge level with opposed rolls.

Jericho said:

That doesn't really match what I've seen so far.

Wounds are not necessarily only cuts and bruises, I would say that they also represent a type of long term fatigue in this system.

Yes, crits are very rare if you only count the times you get more boons than the CR, but you should not forget that there are many action cards/NPC abilities that cause crits way easier. In our first battle our troll slayer had 4 crits but had something like 4 wounds remaining. And he's not even that high on soak (a soak of 5, being a troll slayer of rank 1 with T=4).

oh. Suddenly, I realise standards NPC aren't made to crit except with some of their action cards which include critical hits.

It's very rare they have yellow dice...

And mostly I noticed they have a damage value in bracket next to STR, but no explicit Critical Rating with it. Maybe I'm wrong ? As a GM I should remember to put it from the weapon pages (including i.e. unarmed attacks).

gruntl said:

Yep, this is my take on what i want from the system too. From an GM perspective the ONLY thing I really care about about a combat is what wounds and criticals the PCs are left with at the end of it. Sure, I want to make it tactical and interesting to them so they can try all their snazzy equipments and skills and stuff, but the NPCs are there to provide them with a foil against which to try out their skills nothing more.

I would personally much rather have that happen in a relatively quick and frenetic way, rather than many rounds on "inactivity" where either the attack misses or the defender parries etc etc..

I think there is a possible issue, that I mentioned previously, where there isn't any kind of ability to convert excess successes into boons to use for criticals, The upshot of that is you can end up getting someone who rolls and hits for wounds only and then someone else who rolls exactly the same dice pool but gets wounds and a critical.

If this happens consistently, then everything else being equal you'd expect the person rolling wounds+critical to win the combat.

The problem with the system, if there is one, is that there isn't a lot you can do tactically with your dice pool (stance, adding in fortune dice etc) that aids you in improving your chances of getting more boons and therefore criticals. Rolling more dice increases you chances of gettnig boons generally, but it increases you chances of getting more successes even more.

The main thing is to get some expertise dice into your pot to hopefully come up with a comet, but even that has more chance of being a success or boon.

For those who want to use Opposed rolls for combat, maybe a houserule for the Opposed roll system could make it scalable, even in non-combat situations ?

Let's say we reverse the present relative importance of characteristic vs skill.

IE.: Equal characteristic becomes two Black dice and skill and specialisation each add 1 Purple die per level of each (So a fully maxed out warrior with a spec. in his wielded weapon would impose 2 Black and 4 Purple dice on an opponent with the same Strenght characteristic.).

Using this system, two whimps will be able to hit each other (say 2Str only, no skill; that would give two Characteristic dice vs 2 misfortune dice, + defense).

But highly able combatants could effectively defend !

I'm not sure to understand what you mean by "opposed rolls"...

In Warhammer we never had to oppose the result of 2 checks, one offensive and one defensive. Once again in 3rd edition, the test called "opposed check" is not 2 opposed rolls. It's only one check where the number of challenge dice (from 0 to 4) is set by the comparison between the active characteristic and the opposed characteristic.

Beside that, opposed check propose to add 1 black dice per proper skill trained, 1 per proper specialization and finally A/C/E dices.

willmanx said:

Exactly what I 'm talking about.

My suggestion is to swap the Black and Purple dice. Black for the comparison between characteristics and Purple for training and specialisation.

That makes training the major factor.

There is also the competitive check where both fighters roll dice pools. This would however result in two equal opponents having 50% chance to hit each other when not using parry which is a bit silly. Plys it would double the rolling.

But some sort of defence is in order, but sadly it isn't just combat. The system stretches into observation rolls, magic etc. where the one rolling will "always" win and the one being observed, sneaked past etc. will "always" lose. For rolls involving two people opposing each other I am going to always use competitive rolls.

But then there are rolls to discover a very well hidden book... even with a d4 difficulty the players only need 10 experience point to get a 82% chance of finding it... I mean... WHAT?

There is something completely wrong with the matematicians at FFG. Putting 50% successes on a blue die and 70% on a green die is really silly when even beginning players can start out with 5 total.

Perhaps the easiest is to simply make a chaos star a certain failure. That's 12½% failure chance. But then of course that would be the only deciding factor. Bah!

Gallows-"But then there are rolls to discover a very well hidden book... even with a d4 difficulty the players only need 10 experience point to get a 82% chance of finding it... I mean... WHAT?"

Hey Gallows, just curious about your thoughts on that number. I just tried a bunch of rolls on the online die roller. I took a beginning character, spent all of his creation points on intelligence raises (putting him at 7), observation expertise twice, intelligence fortune twice, and specialization in observation. Throw on a few conservative stances and that's all of his points. That could give him a pool of 3 Blue, 4 Green, 2 yellow, 3 White. And I'm getting something around 80% success rates on searching against 4d. If you the greens out for standard blue it comes down to around 70%. So I'm getting around your quoted number. But I had to spend every single creation point and Advance on that one skill and attribute. And if that's my character then obviously when I'm looking for something, I wanna find it! I didn't spend all of those points for nothing! So maybe that's not such a bad success rate for such a highly focused character? What do you think?

It's a bad success rate when it's the highest difficulty. But just wait until you create a character with 10 exp, rank2.

His success rates will be:

0d = ~100% (rounded up - 96% chance for 3 successes)

1d = 99%

2d = 95%

3d = 88%

4d = 80%

The biggest issue is that there is only 20% difference between the easiest and the very hardest... especially when you read the difficulty desriptions in the core book... that tells me that FFG didn't even try to do the math to make a system that works for more than the first 9 sessions.

Hey Gallows, I should have clarified, that was a character with 10 xp, rank 2. And like I said that was with every single advance going towards intelligence/observation. I guess I'm just thinking that 80% isn't that high if you consider how focused the character is. Even though he's only rank 2 he's very very specialized so I'd expect him to be able to find even difficult to find things most of the time.

I admit that my gut instinct is that success is a bit easy to come by but then every time I crunch the numbers and think about it it sort of makes sense to me. Again, it'll be interesting to see how I feel about it once dice hit the table for real.

Also, yes, that's a narrow spread of success rates betwwen 0d and 4d difficulty (20%) but again that's for a highly focused character, by no means inexperienced. However, for a more standard skill level (4 with expertise and fortune) the difficulty spread goes from around 98% at 0d difficulty all the way down to 40% chance of success at 4d difficulty. I don't think that's too bad.

I try not to repost myself, but the other thread is identical to this one, so for parity:

So what you're saying is that someone who is obviously incredibly well trained, and well suited to observation tests is generally going to succeed at observation tests? I am not sure the problem is THAT out of whack when you are pairing a character that is obviously geared towards X performing X-type tasks. How is said character in other elements of the game?

I will say, as a GM and author for my group's campaigns, I often do rely on multiple success criteria, but not in every case. I just don't know that it needs to become a formal rule, nor am I sufficiently convinced that it's a problem.

Furthermore, there is some debate about whether the ruleset or even a GM should allow a PC to go deep into conservative or reckless stances in storymode without some significant justification for doing so. As I outlined in another thread about stances in storymode, there needs to be compelling justification for going deep into a stance, and I make sure we outline the results before the role. For instance, going green with the delays WILL have a negative impact in some way. So while yes, a master of observation who is going to take AS MUCH TIME IS NECESSARY to find a secret door/book/whatever in a room will likely be able to do so, but the time taken to do so may result in them being caught in the act (or similar).

Ha, looks like I've been saying the same thing you've been saying elsewhere Hedge...where's the other thread?

The issue is the increase of characteristic dice. There are simply too many when players get to high rank so the GM has to throw 7+ purple in there to give players a real challenge. Also the great number of dice slowly make a lot of cards and fortune points pontless, because their effect does not scale with the system. The defensive cards do not scale with the system, so a fearsome fighter becomes worse and worse at defending against an equal opponent as he ranks up.

the extra chance for a success ONE characterristic die add is is simply too great considering the number of them. It creates a very unwieldy situations for GMs if they want to challenge the characters skills.

There is a side effect of the system as written that no one has brought up so far (that I have seen). As a character advances, and become crazy powerful and can hit with every attack, in theory, so should the bad guys, after rank 3 or so, combat should actually become even more deadly, for the PC's and NPC's. Since a decent number of baddies have abilities that cause crits fairly easily, as they get more and more guarenteed of success, the PC's should be more and more guarenteed of receiving those crits. Some of those higher level demons have strenghts in the 8-10 range, no in addition to this being a lot of dice thrown in the dice pool, that's 8 dmg base, + weapon damage. Now if that demon is using a great weapon thats already 15 dmg on a basic, no frills hit, and with that many dice thrown, getting boons to activate crits and other effects become much more likley as well.

Not saying the system is good, just saying, there is a sense of "Balance" as the bad guys can get just as deadly as the good guys. Just a thought.

Please check my simple reflexion and rule limitation in this thread ? I think I've got something quite cool to solve that problem.

(Moreover could we please guys moderate us about this subject and talk about it on less threads at the same time ?)

I didn't see the other thread, thanks for the link. I guess my thoughts, for organizational purposes, was that here under the Rules Forum the subject of whether or not the rule was broken or how much it was broken was up for discussion. I didn't really think the discussion under House Rules was a good place to debate whether a change was needed but was instead where the discussion for how to go about the change should take place. I like what you guys are discussing, just didn't want to muck up your progress over there with debates on whether it was necessary or not.

Is there really an issue with the high success rate of hitting?
Just to look at this from a different perspective. I’m not saying that this is better, I just think it is prudent to ensure that it’s in peoples minds when discussing the high success rates.

For me the action card represents what you are doing as an ‘extended’ attack action (over a period of time definable only by the GM in your particular game) and not ‘one attack/swipe’ with a weapon.
The hitting of an opponent is obviously crucial to the combat system, but then so is the damage attack potential and damage soak potential of the combatants.

Let me use an example to help with my point:

There are two PC’s attacking an Evil Gribblie. One PC is melee based - the other is not. The melee character is a Dwarf with a starting strength of 5 and the scribe has a strength of 3. Dwarf can have a great weapon (7/2) and the Scribe can have a hand weapon (5/3).
As people have noted, a starting scribe is more likely to hit than not, so using RAW we can accept both characters will hit quite frequently. Possibly every turn.
The Dwarfs damage potential is 12 for 1 success and 14 for 3 successes (conservative stance).
The Scribes damage potential is 8 for 1 success and 10 for 3 successes (conservative stance).

The Evil Gribblie has defensive stats for toughness of 4(2) – with 12 wounds. His damage soak potential is 6.

The Dwarf will take 2 turns of a basic melee action card to kill the Evil Gribblie based on only one success per turn. He has a damage attack potential of 12 (7+5 = 12) – less the soak is 6 wounds per turn. (He can kill the Evil Gribblie in ONE turn with the Thundering Blow action card and rolling a comet: 7 + 7 + 5 – 6 = 13 wounds in one turn for just one success and one comet).

The Scribe will take 6 turns using basic melee action card to kill the Evil Gribblie, (5 + 3 – 6 = 2 wounds per turn) again based on only one success per turn. If the Evil Gribblie was a Mighty Evil Gribblie with toughness stat of 4(3), the scribe would be there for 12 rounds (assuming one success per turn) slowly hacking bits of the Mighty Evil Gribbly, who quite possibly could have eaten his own body weight of small local fauna AND dish out a few crits on the scribe by then.

When the Evil Gribblie attacks it will hit and cause at least 1 wound per turn (assuming it has the same likelihood of hitting as the characters do). So that’s a minimum of 1 wound on the dwarf and 5 wounds on the scribe over the course of the combat, with the characters hitting for one success each turn. Obviously, if the damage attack potential is greater than the damage soak potential of the characters then their wounds will accumulate quicker.

So – conceding that there is a high likelihood of both sides hitting – the melee character will kill the Evil Gribblie without breaking a sweat, but the scribe (who has been documenting the behaviour of Gribblies of varying sizes that show evil tendencies) will be much the worse for wear. The Gribblie even stands a chance of killing the scribe depending on the damage potentials.

Although I’ve made the stats for the Evil Griblie up – you can your own creature and work out the damage potentials to see how long it takes to kill the creature.

Anyway – point is – even if the scribe hits each turn – it is still going to take him longer to kill the opponent when armed with basic weaponry and basic attack cards (and therefore more opportunity to be hit by the opponent and suffer more wounds themselves) then a character designed to fight in melee. If your players have scribes with great weapons and strength of 10 with several attack cards, are they really portraying a scribe and roleplaying their character well?

Well the ultimate question is what is right for your group. My group has 4 out of 6 character playing non combat types. 2 of the 4 have to hit stats of 3 with no training. So they are around the 50% to hit chance, sometimes less when I used basic defences against them. Then I have 3 characters with 4 stats, and one character running around with a 5 , trained in melee, with a specialization.

As you can see this party actually misses more than you think, and having seen on the threads here I began to think maybe I should do something about the success rate, but there perception among the non combative types is "please don't nerf us hitting"

Although you may feel the game isn't providing enough misses, it is balanced since the monsters have a high success rate as well. It's the perception of the high hit rate seeming "unrealistic" and not dynamic that's really the issue.

I suspect the real problem in the system lies somewhere between the "optimization / playing combat junkies" and the math being off. One of the things all these math threads are doing is taking the maxium optimized warrior into consideration when we might need to consider what the "average" player is like. Otherwise we are making the statement that everyone wants to play a highly optimized combat master.

I have a couple of ideas of what I will do should I run another campaign, but before I do anything, I want to see what the GM box says.

The factoring of soak and wounds on other side is part of the discussion I've been hoping see.

The A/C/E budget is also important as the GM uses it to add bad dice to player actions as well as boost monsters. I know they say "opposed checks" and there's the stuff about combat opposed or not but the text in TOA for them suggests the A pool definitely can be used in combat.

My take on the game is that combat should be fast with results on both sides and I suspect design is not simply about "success" but about how often triple success is triggered, boons, banes etc.

I haven't had chance to play enough to judge, particularly high levels, but if tweaking my inclination would not be to revise core mechanics or PC dice pools but to do things like:

- add speciality lines to monster text more often noting thick skins or other aspects adding challenge die to PC pools

- boosting ACE budgets

The most disturbing thing I've seen so far is the issue when correlating PC abiilty maximums and monster abilities. It is weird a PC can eventually have a Strength greater than a Giant's.

Rob

One of the issues is that because of the insane amount of dice you get from characteristics, the bonus dice you get from cards, defence cards, talents etc. slowly become irrelevant to use because they offer so little a bonus the more dice you get... no scalability in the system for defence, cards, talents etc.

Gallows said:

Now you're making the assumption that there will not be any new cards/talents when PC's start to reach rank 3 or higher (which I'm pretty much certain will happen). The basic defense cards will become more irrelevant true, but just maybe you aren't supposed to use your free dodge card when facing a Greater Daemon but rather the "Expert Dodge" card that will come with some expansion.

I would agree that the core set seem to be a bit unscalable up to higher ranks (well, you can see that easily by looking at the available action cards).

Also, check the new designer diary, it touches on the issue of successes being easy to obtain.