Dvang, I think the problem is the fact that after say 7-8 sessions should you really succeed at a Daunting 4D check over 60% of the time? That's nuts. Sure, you didn't include misfortune dice but you also didn't include stance dice which shift things heavily. I don't mind characters always hitting in combat, but when you move it to skill checks you lose a lot of fun by always having players succeed. Failure, often times, produces a more interesting narrative than success.

I don't have a problem with a 2d or 3d task being easy to make for relatively experienced characters. But how do you really challenge those characters with skill checks then if 4d is the cap?

charlest said:

you resume what I thought really well here.
Personally I do not want even an experience character to have % that high as mentionned. I mean the base one without talking about misfortune dices etc.
Also I would like to keep the level difficulty around 1-3 and rarely using 4 dices.
Failure is important even for an experimented character. For me its only a problem of balance.
I also have to admit I do not like the use of tons of dices for one throw.

Dvang, I think the problem is the fact that after say 7-8 sessions should you really succeed at a Daunting 4D check over 60% of the time?

If the PC is attempting a task in their field of specialty ... yes. They've put an awful lots of their experience towards it.

It's like taking a Dark Heresy tech priest, who has bought all their Int increases plus all their +tech-use increases and asking them to make a difficult tech use check. They're going to have a good chance of succeeding by virtue of their experience and advances, no matter how difficult the check is. This doesn't seem unrealistic to me. An Olympic athlete will have a good chance of succeeding at even difficult tasks in their field of expertise.

I would suggest house ruling away the 1-4d difficulty range, notably the 4d cap. Have it open ended, and feel free to scale the difficulty up. After all, the 1-4 does not scale with character experience/ability. So, once the game gets into higher levels, and assuming the tasks actually get more difficult, it seems reasonable for the GM to throw 5 or 6 challenge dice for difficulty.

Didn't the design notes state things were slightly easier for starting characters on purpose? In that latest dice post?

keltheos said:

Starting characters have never been an issue in my opinion. But I am currently too busy creating my own stuff in Strange Eons to worry about rules... for now

keltheos said:

Yes they did.

During a fight against serious foes, I make opposed checks in combat, as proposed in the rulebook p.58, instead of a flat 1d easy difficulty. It add challenge and misfortune dices to the pool.

Should we just make the basic difficulty in combat Average 2d ?

And maybe Easy 1d for casting ?

Using opposed rolls breaks down in higher levels doesn't it ?

A 2 blue 2 red 1 yellow pool against 2d of difficulty gives a base 70% chance of at least one success.

Add to that 2 black for defense and dodge and you're down to 56% chance of success. With only 20% chance of three successes, which are needed for really good hits.

-

The more I think about this problem I believe that Defense and Difficulty levels are the problem, not the rest of the rules. Leave everything as is and make defense and difficulty more effective and the problem goes away. Here's a SIMPLE idea to recalibrate the mechanics.

BASE DIFFICULTY COMBAT: 2 PURPLE

BASE DIFFICULTY CASTING: 1 PURPLE

DIFFICULTY RATINGS FOR TESTS: add 1 PURPLE TO ALL TESTS (ie. Average becomes 3 PURPLE)

OPPOSED CHECKS: ADD 1 PURPLE FOR EACH TRAINING LEVEL AND EACH SPECIALISATION

ADVANCED ACTIVE DEFENSE: 1 PURPLE + 1 PURPLE FOR TRAINING (OR 1 BLACK PER LEVEL OF TRAINING)

With these rules, the above example would not change, but if theopponent was skilled in Coordination and had the Advanced dogde, would be : 2 Blue 2 Red 1 Yellow "against" 2 Purple + 1 Black for armour + 2 Purple for advanced dodge. That would give a 36% chance of success only... Which would mean that an advanced combatant could very effectively defend against a competent starting PC.

Sounds good doesn't it ?

Add to that a White for an assist and a black for a guarded position helping the defender and you've got the same probabilities in a very common combat situation. My houserule seems sturdy enough, doesn't it ?

My two cents.

I have another SIMPLE idea to "repair" opposed tests for combat (outside of combat, I wonder if one shouldn't always use Contest tests where the most successes wins ?).

Why not compare characteristics AND skill and spec all together as one ?

Take Characteristic + 1 per skill level + 1 per specialisation for each side and then apply the normal comparison difficulty.

Then you still add Black dice for skill and specialisation. It sort of counts skill and spec twice, but that's to compensate for the lack of scaling in the principal comparison. Usually, advanced characters also have skills to boot. The idea is to have roughly equal opponents end up with a 50% either way, mist of the time... Using the dice stats tool to figure this one out... Seems to work out ...

EXAMPLES:

Two very strong characteristics but no skills:

4 Blue 1 Green against same characteristic no skills = 2 Purple = 67% chance of success.

Unskilled strongmen will pound at each other with abandon...

Two John Does no skills:

3 blue against 3 blue = 2 Purple = 38% of success

Unskilled John Does will have a hard time connecting effectively... (feels realistic to me)

One very strong 5str against a very skilled John Doe defending, 3str , 1 skill, 1 spec = 4 Blue, 1 Red against 2 Purple + 2 Black = 50% chance

I can't go further into this, but the results seem interesting enough to do so another day.

Jericho said:

Hehe I was through this ideas as well earlier. I'll just repost our hose rules with comments from our last session... look through them. I think they adress your concerns without changing too much.

Characteristic dice limiting rule:

• Max starting value for a characteristic is 4. Humans start with 14 creation points and dwarves/elves start with 9 points. You can never raise your characteristic more than 3 over your racial starting value. Humans can however one characteristic as their main one, to allow for one extra point potential. This worked pretty well. With the stats a bit lower than what the core rulebook suggests we felt that the game was spot on for new characters. New characters are still a lot stronger than in the old rules, but it was good.

•The default difficulty to attack a target is it's rank or its threat level minus 1 (min 1 max 4). You can never get assigned a greater default difficulty than your own rank or characteristic dice in the pool, whichever is lower. Other circumstances may increase the difficulty further however. Since everyone was rank 1 this rule hasn't been used. I hope FFG will release new material, so higher ranks are balanced better before we need to use this rule to be honest.

•Reactive defense cards add 1d as per normal rules, but when you attack someone using reactive defense a chaos star signifies a miss, no matter how many successes in the roll (ie. the attack misses no matter how many successes there are). This worked really well. It made sure that no matter how many dice someone used, the active defence cards were worth using.

•Each character gets one stance piece in both directions. The stance pieces shown on a career card are the maximum number of stances the character can get in those professions. To buy additional stance pieces costs the character an advancement. This way, characters are not stacked in their conservative and reckless dice and have to actually spend points to get more dice, rather than getting them for free. In addition, when you switch careers you do not lose stance pieces. You retain the ones you have. However, you can only advance stance pieces if the new career has additional stance pieces you do not have (i.e. if you had 2 reckless pieces and the new career gives you 3 reckless you may now purchase an additional reckless). This was another great addition to our house rules. First it gave the players another area where they could progress without unbalancing the game. Limiting the dice pool to max 3 stance dice, was great as well. We found that this rule played well.

Stat limits:

•The limit for any characteristic is 6. This is just a temporary rule until we see what FFG release. Perhaps it becomes irrelevant when expansions come into play.

•You can only get one fortune die for each stat. We all agreed that this one was good. While it's just a fortune die, we recognized that 6 fortune dice was better than raising your stat from 5 to six, so we felt this should just be a little extra tweak for your stat and nothing more. It also helps to even out the difference between new and experienced players, because to the new player this die can be quite nice and yet cheap.

Critical damage:

•Critical hits deal a number of hits equal to their severity, so if you draw a 3-critical you would draw three additional normal wounds. If the total damage is below 0 after soak and a critical wound was rolled, then the target will suffer this critical wounds and the extra severity wounds can't be soaked. If two or more criticals were inflicted then just one gets through . Originally we had a bonus of one extra damage for every success over 3, but that proved to be too random and didn't really add anything to the game, because it made boons less valuable. That rule was scrapped. But our critical rule was a success, because it made criticals more serious, plus it added some more variety to damage without unbalancing things.

Assisting in combat:

•You can only assist someone in combat, who has a lower skill level, to get a fortune die - both must be engaged with the same target. If two players are engaged with the same NPC one of them can assist the other allowing him to perform a parry or block for an attack against that player. This could lead to two blocks against one attack or even two blocks and two parries. The assisting player uses his free maneuver for this assist and he uses his reactive defense card(s) as well. Everyone liked this rules, because we found the combat assisting to be silly. We allow assisting of players with less skill however, to give some support to non combat careers. This saved a particularly unlucky wizards apprentice twice durring our long session yesterday. Worked great.

In every RPG I played in the last 20 years I tried to keep the OFFICIAL RULES or to modify them only a little to fix some balance issue.

Regarding WHFR3 it's obvious that hitting is too easy even if I perfectly agree that a combat should not take too much time.

If it s too easy to hit than players stop to spend xp on increasing related skills.

As many other people I believe EVERY check should be an opposed check and EVERY Active Defence should be converted from black to purple dice.

Otherwise using a defense provides such a little % decrease on an attack that become nearly useless.

I STRONGLY SUGGEST TO FFG STAFF TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE instead of simply adding new cards in future expansions.

For all the percentages and stuff that people have theoretically calculated I still do not see this is an issue.

From our sessions yes we have found that we do hit more often than we use to but have not found it to be the problem that seems to be presented here. We often fail to get the greater levels of successes that trigger some of the more powerful effects.

I do not believe that FFG have to change the mechanics on this one.

Amketch said:

You may be right... for now. Our regular sessions involve players with 4 experience points each. The game has a fine balance.

But we have tried conducting fights with characters that have 30 experience points and the fights change a lot. In fact when a player failed to get three successes for the fifth time in the fight he was annoyed at the bad luck. 5+ successes... shrug... they got them all the time and they were not at all useful to them. I had a NPC with all three advanced defence cards and even when he threw all three in there, they kept hitting, except for a few misses and a very big portion of those (over 50%) were three successes. I even had a monster use all three defensive cards, burn it's 5 cunning on misfortune... still the player hit (we calculated the chance of success to 70%).

Gallows said:

You may be right... for now. Our regular sessions involve players with 4 experience points each. The game has a fine balance.

But we have tried conducting fights with characters that have 30 experience points and the fights change a lot. In fact when a player failed to get three successes for the fifth time in the fight he was annoyed at the bad luck. 5+ successes... shrug... they got them all the time and they were not at all useful to them. I had a NPC with all three advanced defence cards and even when he threw all three in there, they kept hitting, except for a few misses and a very big portion of those (over 50%) were three successes. I even had a monster use all three defensive cards, burn it's 5 cunning on misfortune... still the player hit (we calculated the chance of success to 70%).

As for active defence. They are easy to fix. Simply use my rule with chaos stars being a miss despite successes when active defence is used. That gives a fail rate of 23% on 2d from chaos stars alone! That works.

add more challenge dice (not only one) and misfortune dices through opposed checks as suggested p.58 It balances things a bit.

Gallows said:

Yes you are right here we only have only 6 or 7 experience points each and only one character is actually purely combat focused.

At higher levels of experience I can see it becoming a problem but I am not worried about that for now, what I don’t like is seeing statements about the system being clearly broken and needing correction.

Though it does emphasise the system is not complete I expect to see higher level defence becoming available, if we get them in time is another matter.

Have you tried your 30 experience characters against some of the more powerful monsters rather than other human NPCs.