The green dice has 70% success sides, 30% boon sides, 20% delay sides.

The red dice has 50% success sides, 30% boon sides, 20% fatigue sides, 20% bane sides.

Why would anyone EVER use red dice? When looking at action cards they don't even warrant the extra risk. When you do the math the green dice will always have a greater chance of creating three successes. The green dice only have 20% chance for a delay, which isn't that serious. The red dice have 40% chance for something nasty, especially the cancelling of boons for criticals.

The game works pretty well generally when characters have stats at 4 or below... but from there is starts to go wrong. I don't see a reason for skill checks when a stating character has 85% chance of making an average skill check and 58% chance to make the hardest check. Soon rolling won't matter unless the GM make everything difficulty d4 and cheats and invents difficulty d5-10.

Opposed rolls. Sneaking past someone being alert. It is tipped way too much in favor of the one making the roll. If you sneak past someone you are almost certain of success... but if the guard decides to make an observation roll he's almost certain to discover the PC. It works both ways and I can see rolls becomming increasingly pointless.

I really think they failed on the dice. There are WAY too many successes on each die to make a balanced system. Some rolls are d0 and even with ONE die your chance of success is 50%. There should be perhaps 2 success symbols on a blue die instead... but alas, I think they were caught up in the fancyness of the system to bother with maths. Since the system doesn't use regular dice it's not that easy to change around. But I am thinking about using regular dice and setting a success number, like in the Vampire system... that worked.

It would be nice if FFG could comment on this, the success rates and these dice mechanics.

IMO they should just redo the dice and make a mathematically balanced system.

Aren't there double successes on the Reckless dice? Or am I making that up?

yep, and also double boons, i believe.

boons = criticals

But isn't the point that some of those success sides on the red dice generate double successes?

It makes sense in terms of the game. When reckless you are going all out seeking that big hit. You may hit less often than some one being cautious, relying on their skill, working for an opening etc... but when you do finally bash you way through your opponents defence, your blow is going to do more damage.

A quick test shoes a double success comes up on the red dice about 24% (from 50 rolls) of the time.

It appears to be the same with boons. You may get them less often with the Reckless dice, but you can get multiples on a single roll.

So, as a gut reaction it seems the player has a choice - go green and hit more often, but with less hits you tend to do the base damage and whittle away at you opponent. Or go red - hit less often, but when you do hit there is a chance to do much more damage and crits ending the fight quicker.

I'd also add that delays can be as serious or inconsequential as the GM desires.

Sure, it may not seem like a big deal to take your time dealing with the faceless mooks... until you find out the time you wasted allowed the big bad cult to summon a Greater Daemon in the middle of the city...

-- scratch that math mistake have to look at my actual dice --

Rob

Read the latest diary. If that won't give you an idea of how and why the dice are like they are then I think this system is not for you.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=1088

Lucas Adorn said:

I've been playing RPGs for two decades and not once have I used a system just as it was printed, so I am comfortable with the fact that the system isn't precisely as I want it to be. I'll just fix it myself. But despite this fact it's still the most enjoyable RPG I've played.

What I had to check to post (re above scratch).

A key thing about the green/red comparison is that if green is more reliable at success without pain (just a bit of delay) red is more likely to produce exceptional success because of the double success faces. This is the basic trade off reflecting the difference in stances and careers/playstyles etc.

It's perfectly fine to prefer one over the other, but I wouldn't tweak the game precisely because someone else may have a different preferences about risk.

Rob

I think Gallows has hit it on the head.

It's unlikely that any two players of a rpg are going to like the same things about it. And what makes a rpg good in my book (and I have 30 years of experience in rpg - yes, I am THAT old) is that it will accommodate all players. That it will allow the players to change things a little to suit their wants without breaking the system.

WHFR is such a game.

So, if you don't like the success rates then go ahead and tinker - me, well, I've only just started running the game and so far am happy with the way things are and have no urge to change anything. Time will tell though....

Munchkin said:

Exactly. Durring those 20 years of playing my troupe and I have tried many systems. Some clever and nice ones. But we have always gone back to the same three systems. Call og Cthulhu because of the nice investigation driven stories and nice grim setting. Vampire the masquerade, because of the nice mood of role playing the struggle of humanity and finally warhammer because of the best fantasy setting we have ever experienced.

All three systems had their issues, but we always fixed them and in the end it was the setting that made us come back... not the system.

Ah ah ! I do love those dices and party cards !

Gallows said:

I would say the answer is quite easy. Because you have not the choice. A normal character has 2G to 2R stance meter, or 1G to 3R, 3G to 1R. You can in a career only add most 2 into one direction, most times only 1. To gain more you will need to switch your career.

If I understand it correctly the increase of a characteristic is quite expensive. That means for me a Skill of 5 represents already a heroic level in a certain skill. That an Average task is not that challenging to that person.

Since my limited statistical sense did not allow me to fully capture all the different effects of the different dice. I took the DiceRoller ( www.gmtools.excelocms.com/ ) and modified it a bit to give me some more statistical data and to speed it up a bit to roll 10000 events in a short time.

I ran a test on a skill level of 5 and changed the range of stance dice from full green until full red. This is the plot. (click to open the full size image)

The green area are the successes and the red area are the fails. "Just Fails" are 0 and 0 Challenges after dice canceling. "Automatic fails" are 1 or 2 Challenges after canceling. And "High Failed" are 3 or more challeges left after canceling.

In the success area the dark blue shows how high the percentage for 4+ successes is. The red plus the dark blue is the chance to have at least 3 successes. Green plus red plus dark blue is the chance to have at least 2 successes. The whole column is the chance to have at least one success.

Please be advised that this runs only had one run of 10000 tries for each dice combination. Though this is already a high number, but it does not represent the exact statistical number for this combination. Also I only used a programmed random number generator. These are no true random numbers, though they should be enough to get a rough estimate.

My own conclusion:
When it comes to large numbers the difference between going full red and full green is only a marginal difference of (smaller 2%) in the general chance to fail/succeed. (Fail: 47,25% full green, 49,13% full red)
You have a slightly higher chance (~4%) to fail on a large scale if you go full red. (3+ Fails: 6,62% full green, 10,23% full red)
The big difference is when it comes to high success results. In this combination there is double the chance to have 4+ Successes (and though coping with an additional misfortune die) with going full red. (4+ Successes: 5,45% full green, 10,71% full red)

(While writing I did a 100000 try run on full red and full green. The success difference went down to 1.33% for that run. The other results where supported by the run.)

I did run some more analysis on the 100k run stack on the more soft components of the rolls. The compared rolls are: Full green: <PPPP>(GGGGG) and Full red: <PPPP>(RRRRR). Each of the Pools have been run for 100000 times. "Double Boons/Banes" means at least two boons/banes. "Boons/Banes on ..." mean that there was at least one.

The first comparison is between Delay and Exertion, the disadvantage effect on the Green (delay) and Red (exertion) die. Since they have the same distribution on the dice the should be equal. If the one or the other has a bigger impact on the game is totally situation and GM specific.

Now to the Boons and Banes. Here are two categories to distinguish: A double roll that has an effect on most cards, or the general presents of any boons/banes, which is more or less taken into account by the GM.

First the doubles. On a Success with Red you have nearly double the chance for a 'double boon' than on a success when going full green (6,8% to 10.3%). But on a Fail with going full green you have double the chance to soften the fall with a 'double boon' than on a full red pool (31.0% to 17.7%).
To roll double banes on a success is high with both pools, though higher with the red one (34.7% to 46.2%). On a fail though there is only a chance of 4.8% chance to have a 'double bane'-result with a green pool, but a 36.4% chance to have it with a red pool. That are 7.5-times the chance for a fail with a double bane to make your fall even harder.

For the 'at least one'-category it is interesting, that on a success the boons on red and green are the same (both 20.5%), on a fail though you have double the chance to have at least one boon on green, than on red (61,28% to 30,36%). On the bane side there is the same situation on the successes as with doubles just a little closer together. In a fail the difference narrows to 3.3-times the chance to have at least one bane on a red die than on a green one.

A closer look on the fail scenario of the green pool reveals some more interesting things. There is a 54.77% chance to have a 'double boon' on a high fail (3+ challenges) and only a 0.55% chance to have a 'double bane' result. To have at least one boon on a high fail is even at 83.11%.

In general one can say that the green pool softens the fails with boons, while the red pool hardens the fall with banes.

I think this is enough statistics for today for me. The next interesting chart I am looking for is a '50% success chance-Chart' and varying the skill level and challenge level.

Wow, thanks for the effort with those. That first graph is superb.

Very nice statistics and very nice dice roller. Would it be possible to add a "Success+chaos" like as well?

Here is the graph with the chaos star distribution. The only real thing you see from the graph is that the Chaos star is an antagonist to the challanges. Each Chaosstar takes a way one Challenge-Die and though reduces the possible numbers of challenges. I did not track the number of Chaosstars in each roll, I only tracked if there was at least one star in the roll.

You can imagine that if you roll 4 chaosstars there is a high probability that you have high success roll, too, since there are no challenges on the table.

With 4 challenge dice there is a 41.5% chance that you will get a chaos star in your roll. With 3 dice its 33%, with 2 dice its 23.4% and with one die its 12.5%.

Ok that much to the chaosstars.

vendolis said:

That's very nice. I am using a house rule that if you roll a chaos star on an attack where active defence was used a shaos star is always a miss. That seems to work because no matter how high players/npc get their dice pool they will always have 23% risk for a chaos star if just one active defence card was used.

This is really awesome...now, can someone explain to me then?

Which is better? RED or GREEN?

jh

As I understand, the outcome of this mathammer is that red and green dice are more or less equal statistically. Red has greater chance of 4+ successes, but it's balanced with more dangerous fails.

D.

Emirikol said:

As Dheran said. They are nearly equal. The difference shows when you have a specific situation.

For example if you have 3 characteristic dice and 3 challenge dice you only have the chance to get a triple success with a full green, or a mixed blue green set, if there are no challenges rolled. Since the red dice have double successes they give a much higher chance on a triple success. On the other hand the green die has a much higher chance to come to a one success or at least a +/-0. In the described case:

<PPP>(GGG): Triple Success: 4% Single Success:20% +/-0 Fail: 23%
<PPP>(RRR): Triple Success: 9% Single Success:16,5% +/-0 Fail: 19.6%

It is like the dice are ment... if you need to try hard to reach a goal, you will need to go all out in a recless stance. If you are quite confident you can play safe in the conservative stance. But the important part to see is, it is always better to have fewer blue dice, no matter how you do it. And the second thing is, most characters can not choose what to take. You stance meter has only a limited range and your main stance will be the most successfull for you.

What I did not take a look at till now are the effects of fortune and misfortune dice. They have the impact of about a halve stance or challenge die. On two misfortune die the chances for a challenge is even higher than on a challange die. A Challenge die has 25% for a singel challenge and 25% for a double challenge. On two misfortune die the chance for a single challenge is 44% and 11% for a double challenge. That give 55% to 50% on a challenge die.

The dice system is quite complex, but when you got the idea that red and green have differeent effect, but give in total a comparable amount of success, you can get a good feeling about how the die work.

vendolis said:

good spot. I hadn't checked the exact mathematcs behind that yet, but sort of knew gut instinct wise. Thats a useful tool from a GM point of view for those who think adding misfortune is irrelevant and it's all about the challenge dice maxing out at 4; misfortune dice are equally if not more important in calculating success chances as the challenge dice themselves.

Wow, must combine "you have too much free time" with "amazing, thanks for the work, now to go digest it all".

There are 7 successes total on both dice and with 10 possible outcomes, that gives an average of 0.7 success per roll of one die.

Huh? So are the maths off or not?

Rat Catcher said:

No the statistics are perfect. I just mentioned the average number of successes on a rolled die, either green or red being the same. They are very close, but the way the cards work is more important than the difference between the dice.