The dice set and some issues.

By Gallows, in WFRP Gamemasters

Gallows 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.

What's your reasoning behind this? It sounds interesting but I guess I'm not seeing the "why".

mykelsss said:

Gallows 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.

What's your reasoning behind this? It sounds interesting but I guess I'm not seeing the "why".

To make active defence work at higher ranks as well. At rank 3+ your opponent may have 90%+ chance of hitting you even if you parry. But with two challenge dice there is about 24% chance for a chaos symbol.

That's a good idea, because a hit is soooo deadly. A zombie hitting inflict 8 points and PCs have 12 wounds... You can't be hit twice.

willmanx said:

That's a good idea, because a hit is soooo deadly. A zombie hitting inflict 8 points and PCs have 12 wounds... You can't be hit twice.

Yeah it works pretty well to ensure that if you fire off three improved defences, then your opponent will have a hard time hiting you. You will be vulnerable next round, but it may just be the break the player needs. With 4 challenge dice the chance for a chaos symbol is over 40%

But I still think my current idea with increasing the potency of the purple die is better balanced and easier to scale across ranks.

I have settles on the following challenge die rules that I will try out our next session.

All successes and double successes work the same as they do normally.

Bane = bane + challenge

2xbane = 2xbane + 2xchallenge

chaos star = chaos star + challenge

That's an average of 1.25 challenges on a roll with the purple die. More potent compared to the 0.75 average. I just found that when a single green die has an average of 0.7 successes and a challenge die has an average of 0.75 challenges, then it can't scale well.

willmanx said:

That's a good idea, because a hit is soooo deadly. A zombie hitting inflict 8 points and PCs have 12 wounds... You can't be hit twice.

Don't forget soak

Lucas Adorn said:

willmanx said:

That's a good idea, because a hit is soooo deadly. A zombie hitting inflict 8 points and PCs have 12 wounds... You can't be hit twice.

Don't forget soak

The wizard in my troupe has a soak of 3. He's dead after 2 hits in most situations. The strongest fighter in our troupe has a total soak of 7, but he still manages to get hurt quite a bit. Of course we have our own critical rule where critical wounds give a number of extra wounds based on their severity.

@Lucas Adorn : Thanks, but I don't forget soak. I don't play a High Fantasy setting, so soak in not really high you know... A commoner and a dilettante with good traveling cloth have got soak 1.When they were hit yesterday by zombies that was a lot of damage.

yesterday, during a session, I was thinking about lowering a bit damages against a target hit while using Parry/dodge/block (I though about getting soak 1 per misfortune dice of defence given by the card use). I don't remember quite well but I think it was how parry worked in V1.

willmanx said:

@Lucas Adorn : Thanks, but I don't forget soak. I don't play a High Fantasy setting, so soak in not really high you know... A commoner and a dilettante with good traveling cloth have got soak 1.When they were hit yesterday by zombies that was a lot of damage.

yesterday, during a session, I was thinking about lowering a bit damages against a target hit while using Parry/dodge/block (I though about getting soak 1 per misfortune dice of defence given by the card use). I don't remember quite well but I think it was how parry worked in V1.

AHHHHH ! **** !I GMed 2 sessions yet... and I forgot to substract Toughness to damage taken in addition of soak for both PCs and NPCs....

Warhammer's going to be less deadly.

Shame on me...

willmanx said:

willmanx said:

@Lucas Adorn : Thanks, but I don't forget soak. I don't play a High Fantasy setting, so soak in not really high you know... A commoner and a dilettante with good traveling cloth have got soak 1.When they were hit yesterday by zombies that was a lot of damage.

yesterday, during a session, I was thinking about lowering a bit damages against a target hit while using Parry/dodge/block (I though about getting soak 1 per misfortune dice of defence given by the card use). I don't remember quite well but I think it was how parry worked in V1.

AHHHHH ! **** !I GMed 2 sessions yet... and I forgot to substract Toughness to damage taken in addition of soak for both PCs and NPCs....

Warhammer's going to be less deadly.

Shame on me...

;) Toughness makes a difference :)

But still if you add even further wounds for crits I can see that two hits will have an impact.

Last session I GM'd I had a Ghoul attack the Ironbreaker who has a combined soak of 10. He is pretty hard to hurt, but I used the the first attack the undeads have which deal alot of stress which he felt a bit harder (WP 3). Thats why I love the Fatigue/stress system. Gives the GM a variety of ways to challenge (hurt) your PC's.

The most effective house rules for making combat more lethal without changing too much for the low soaking characters is to use my critical damage rule. A critical wound deal a number of extra normal wounds based on it's severity and those wounds can't be soaked.