I am new to this system and haven't had a chance to play yet, but have been following the success rate controversy quite a bit. For those players who spend upgrades on stance dice (or even start their careers with a possibility of 3 green or red), wouldn't it be okay to mitigate the success rate by letting multiple delays or fatigue take effect? If I read the rules correctly, only one delay or fatigue is counted no matter how many are rolled. I don't see the harm in allowing multiples to take effect. This might cause the players to stop going into too high of a conservative or reckless stance, no?

Also, why not let the Chaos Star count as a bane or a miss; GMs choice? Would that help?

As far as I recall, all delays/fatigue effects rolled take effect. If you roll 2 delays, then two tokens are added (or initiatives lowered, etc). If you roll 2 fatigue, then you suffer 2 fatigue.

dvang said:

Dvang, I really like this. I may alter your scale a bit, but otherwise really, I do love it. It gives a lot of dynamic feel to the opposed roll where the characters abilities are taken into account for the sake of opposed resolution. I do use a mechanic where the opponents statistics factors into the roll, but that is a whole other thread entirely. What I like about this mechanic, it is the easiest way to make these rolls quickly. I may alter the chart, like I said, in this way:

1 = 1 P

2-3 = PP

4-5 = PPP

6-7= PPPP

8-9 = PPPPP

10 = 6 P

It seems to balance the forces against each other a little better. It would make a chaos warrior completely awesome in a fight, so I will have to take a close look. Would you add an additional black as usual for expertise, relevant talents, etc? I am debating if you still would. The higher curve may lower the high success rate chances for people at high levels, but may be crippling to people with low characteristics and no skill. It is a hard thing to balance and I can see why the designers went the way they did in the end, which I do feel is a fantastic system. Still, there is a use for this for me and I am glad you posted it. Honestly, this scale never occurred to me and now that I have it, I will make use of it alot. So thanks Dvang. Commoners cheer!

Happy Gaming

Commoner

Interesting. You should not forget to start with 0 challenge dice against minor foe... like common NPC in town.

Thanks commoner. It actually hadn't occurred to me either until I started writing. The fact is, as I said, that the PC's (or active character's) abilities are already taken into account in the dice pool. So, using a normal 'opposed' test actually seems like counting the stat twice. Once to get the characteristic/stance dice and once more to determine the difficulty of the test. It actually seems more logical, to me, to therefore have the difficulty be mainly about the opposing stat instead.

I do see Gallow's point that Active Defenses might be affected. However, I'm not sure they will be in a bad way. With additional <P> on an opposed test, the extra failure or bane from even a single misfortune die could end up even more significant.

I am using this at the moment to level difficulty
Works fine for me. checked % of results and it seems correct.

DIFFICULTY
- opponent charac /2. the .5 results are converted in black dices. the full integer numbers in purple.

Characteristic 2 = 1 purple dice
Characteristic 3 = 1.5 = 1 purple + 1 black dice
Characteristic 4 = 2 purple dices
Characteristic 5 = 2 purple dices + 1 black dice
Characteristic 6 = 3 purple dices
...

+ the opponents trained skills, specialisations, tactical disaventages... = black dices
+ adding action cards
- NO DEFENCE bonus for the armor. I am not using the defence only the soaking value. This defence system for me seems weird. I prefer using the AG or corresponding characteristic of opponent.

geekoo said:

Great. In standard rule for opposed checks, two equal characters only kept 50% chance to hit with low characteristics.As I don't want to change too much rules about : black dices (defense, active defense action cards, relevant skills or specialization trained) and purple dice (to set challenge), I will try :

CHALLENGE DICE = Characteristic /2, rounded to inferior.

Maybe a bit less balanced about math, but good in game...

willmanx said:

In fact also initially I tought of a little rule for the stances.

During the process creation you just keep the normal stances. I know Gallows proposed to start with one stance each side and buy extra at creation. I stay with the normal stances at start but when playing I change slightly the rules:

You can use stances but not more stances dices then the half of your characteristic!

so for example:

Characteristic 2 = 1 stance dice
Characteristic 3 = 1 stance dice max - cause 3/2 = 1.5 so 1 dice
Characteristic 4 = 2 stances dices max - 4/2 = 2 of course
Characteristic 5 = 2 stances dices max
Characteristic 6 = 3 stances dices max

and for difficulty as mentioned on top

Characteristic 2 = 1 purple dice
Characteristic 3 = 1.5 = 1 purple + 1 black dice
Characteristic 4 = 2 purple dices
Characteristic 5 = 2 purple dices + 1 black dice
Characteristic 6 = 3 purple dices

So mxing those 2 small changes I think it balance the difficulty level. Also you could adopt or not the stance changes to make the % a little more challenging.
I think it works fine

geekoo said:

As for agility as defence. I don't like that too much as a passive defence. The armor having passive defence makes sense as it can make blows miss by making blows slide off the armor or hit through the armor without hitting the person in it (a robe). Using agility as defence on the other hand requires some sort of activity by the person defending to make sense and that is where the reactive cards come into play. Hitting someone not defending should not be hard. With three defence cards, that each have a recharge value of 2 you can use one each round and every second round you can use two. Always factor that into the difficulty and monsters also have the defence reactions.

Since the power of the defence card is dependant on your agility I'd say the defence part of agility is already covered.

But apart from that I can see some good balance in your rules, so I'm not saying they are bad at all.

Gallows said:

I dont really like the passive defence system. For me the sliding on the armour as you explain could be part of the soaking or a miss when u hit.
Its really a part of the rules I dont like giving a defensive value to the armor. Its the first thing I took out
In my games I only allow one defensive card per attack, not like its permitted in the core game where u can use 3...
U only block or parry or dodge or use an advanced defensive card. Also if for some reason you have a certain number of defences to do, I do not allow a character to dodge, parry twice or parry and advance parry after... They have to use another available defence.
I think that adding agility + a defensive card works well + any bonus or malus
I always allow characters to defend except in exceptional cases (backstab, surprised etc...).
If its the case no defensive card is allowed and often a malus according the situation is added.

They can perform a certain number of defensive actions = to their agility
And usually only one attack per round unless special action card.
The action of kicking butt is counted in the total of actions they can perform a round.
exemple:
AG 3 would mean 1 attack and 2 defences. on second defence 1 extra black dice
AG 4 would mean 1 attack and 3 defences. on second defence 1 extra black dice - on third 2 black dices.
or
AG 3: 0 attack 3 defences. On thrd defence 1 extra black dice
AG4: 0 attack 4 defences. On thrd defence 1 extra black dice on 4th 2 extra black dices.

its the base of 2 actions with no malus either you attack or defend after that u add one extra black dice for every action.

(But really its rare for a character in a session to be able to perform 4 actions a round. Usually 1 or 2 defences.)

The difficulty system I use is the same for NPCs and PCs.

I will also change the sequence of iniative of cards in a near future and the core system.
The main idea is that I divide the round in sequences and that the recharge time of cards is not calculated in rounds but in sequences inside each round.

I will of course still have to slightly work on this. It works so far.

Thanks for remarks

A character can't have both parry and improved parry. The improved cards REPLACE the basic ones. If you look at defence cards from a mathematical point of view, allowing players to use all three defences at once isn't really that powerful and leaves them completely open the next turn.

For instance a player with 5 strenght and using three stance dice, having specialty for WS and a fortune die in strenght, plus having one point in weapon skill will have 88% chance to hit someone and if three improved defences are used this chance only drops to 54%

So the defence cards in the core rules are not that great.

Gallows said:

Yes of course that seems logical for the improved defence cards and normal ones.

geekoo said:

I like this. Seems simple and math friendly enough to use it.

/signed

I'm also with Geekoo on the agility as base for defence, and treating defence more like "if you can hit me" in opposition to "slide off the armor" which IMO should be part of a soak.

But I plan on using armor defence values, as well as active defence cards, just in a bit other fashion.

Here is a draft of the concept (mind that I'm using above quoted rules, and AG as a base defence in below concept, so this will replace in my case the 1 <P> default on "vs Target Defence"):

ARMORS

In simple words "the heavier the armor, the easier you are to hit, but the soak is better too".

Armor defence and soak change as follows:

Cloth D (0), S (0)

Robes D (-1), S (1)

Leather D (-1), S (2)

Brigandine D (0), S (1)

Mail Shirt D (0), S (2)

Chainmail D (-1), S (3)

Scale D (-1), S (4)

Ulthuan Scale D (0), S (3)

Breastplate and Chain D (-1), S (4)

Full Plate D (-2), S (5)

To count your defence, take Agility Value, and add armors Defence value to it (note, that most of the defence values are in negative numbers), before you make a division by 2.
Someone with AG 4 in a plate armor can use only 2 points of his agility (AG 4 minus 2 for plate defence), which results in defence 1 (reminder of the agility divided by 2), so base difficulty for any attacks targeting him is 1 <P>, and soaks 5 damage.
The same character in a Mail Shirt can use his full AG, which results in defence 2 (agility 4 divided by 2), so base difficulty for any attacks targeting him is 2 <P>, but soaks only 2 damage.
SImiliar in Breastplate the same character can use 3 points of his AG (4 minus 1 for Breastplate defence), which results in defence 1.5, so base difficulty for any attacks targeting him is 1 <P> and 1 , and soaks 4 damage.

SHIELDS

I plan on using them more like in 2-nd ed.

1. Shields ONLY add their defence value in misfortune dice on a BLOCK action! You can block Ranged Attacks.
2. Shields SOAK value is ONLY used in case of splash damage (area attacks, explosions, maybe troll vomit etc).

Shields Defence and Soak values stay as they are.

Thats my 5 cents on the subject

PS: this is NOT TESTED yet.

What I don't like about keying off Agility is that it makes it a mandatory stat for PCs to boost up if they want to be 'defensy'. Especially where it doubles for ranged attacks AND defense. And with the restrictions on how to upgrade non-career stats can really take its toll on some careers (or players will simply avoid the more non-combat oriented ones).

keltheos said:

Warhammer is not only about combat. I dont think using AG as base would be a problem, it is done in a lot of RPG.
I would do a good balance mix between different characteristics.

I do like the ideas of Sunatet regarding the defence value in negative, did not think about this one and really its infact very logical. Very good!

keltheos said:

I don't like god stats either, but I see nothing else I could key defence on.

And fixed defence doesn't sound very tempting to me.

Beside, there are already god stats:

- Strength is a god stat for 'aggresive' characters that want to fight well, deal a lot of damage and carry more

- Toughness is even more a god stat. It governs your HP, how many wounds you may shrug off, how many crits on 0 wound treshold you can survive, your fatigue, resistance to many effects, and more.

- Willpower is everything if you care about your sanity, stress, and want to use magic

- Fellowship is a god stat of interacting with others, trading, talking, social encounters, its all about fellowship, and also more than important to priests.

- and Inteligence is base of big part of the skill tree (1 per every 3 skills is based on Int), and absolute must for wizards

- Agility for now is a god stat for ranged combat, acrobatic/thievery, and initiative tests,

IMO adding defence here won't change that much (I can be wrong, I tell you after I make some tests), besides if all your players invest everything in Agility they will fail in most tests in anything else.

Also my another opinion is, that RPG is not about investing in god stats (unless you have minmaxers in your team), but about investing in stats that fit the character you are playing. I don't see anyone from most groups I played with investing in agility because its a god stat if he plays a diplomat, and his main job is talking.

I agree with Keltheos. You're putting too much of a priority on Agility by making it count as Defense too. I would suggest, as I have when the idea of opposed tests for combat first came up, use the same stat as they are being attacked with.

So, defense in melee is an opposing St ... defense against a ranged attack is an opposing Ag. This keeps things a little more balanced between the stats. St is for melee combat, Ag is for ranged combat.

You also need to consider the effect of how your changes impact armor. Sunatet had a good post about his changes, although I'm not sure I agree with some of his choices of values for the various armors.

dvang said:

Besides in a fight your strenght and toughness will also be a big part of how well you are able to defend yourself. The reaction cards cover the benefits of those characteristics perfectly by each giving one action card of increasing potency based on your rating in the characteristic. If for instance people were wrestling it would be silly to just use agility as defence. If someone is attacking you with a big warhammer it would be equally silly... unless you dodge of course - but hey there's a reaction card for that.

Here is how I see it. If a fighter isn't using a reaction card against an attack then he isn't actively trying to defend himself and only his armor or loose clothing will help him and his high agility certainly won't. Since everyone can get three reaction cards you can actually use one each round to defend yourself or defend yourself against three attacks in one round. That's defence. Defence is active, otherwise a nimble character could in theory get this passive defence bonus against 1000 attackers in one round. That's silly.

Lets say you're up against four attackers and you're a tough fighter. You may try to defend against three of them with cards, but since you only have two arms and can't move with the speed of lightning the last opponent will have little trouble hitting you. It seems logical to me.

To combat the lack of scalability of defence at higher ranks you simply introduce better reactive defence cards.

Defence is a reaction... not something that is passive or automatic.

dvang said:

Hmmm...

You may be right, Strength for melee, Agility for ranged. Doesn't sound bad.

It resolves the god stat problem and leaves us something to base difficulty on.

And to the armor values... yeah, it was a small pain, but I think they are more or less right:

- cloth sums to 0

- leather sums to 1

- chain sums to 2

- scale and plate sums to 3

In original rules you can see that soak, and armor defence sums are increasing by 0-1 each row. So it starts on cloth 0 sum, and ends on plate 6 sum.

If I stayed on this sum I would end up with totally ridiculous numbers, so I halved it...

EDIT:

Ok, I found an error in the armor D S values, scale and breastplate were the same, so I change the scale and breastplate to:

Scale D (-2), S (4)

Ulthuan Scale D (0), S (3)

Breastplate D (-1), S (4)

EDIT2:

Sorry for so much edits.

After brief run through basic bestiary, I think, that I will stay with Agility as a god stat for defence.

Try to hit a giant with its 8 Strenght in melee fight... Its big, and slow, and should be easy to hit, instead you end up with base difficulty of 4 <P>, when you base your defence on his Strenght... add his Long Reach to that... ouch...

Agility on the other hand seems right when considering bestiary cases.Giant Wolf, and Gutter Runner are the only cases with 5 Agility.

Seems right for me, I will stick with it... for a while at least (need some testing)

I have no problem with the agility.
Strengh for how u hit + damage
toughness for "soaking" damage

I see no prob using agility as base difficulty. The maths works also.
Works fine for me.

Max stat allowed for humans is 5 in my game and no more than 4 at creation.
I start with 15 points for humans at creation.

@Sunatet

re: armor

For one example ... it seems kind of silly that robes give the same penalty to defense as chainmail and scale. It also seems strange that they provide as much soak as Brigandine.

re: Agility

I understand what you are saying about the Giant. However, the simple fact is that by making the Agility "king of the stats" you are unfairly penalizing non-agility characters. The archer becomes overpowered, since agility factors into Initiative, ranged attacks, ranged damage, and defense. An Ag 5 archer will outclass everyone else because he's got an amazing offense AND defense.
I really cannot condone this sort of inequality. If you are set on using Agility, then I'd say take some stuff away. Make Init based on Init or WP is a start, for example. Then make ranged attack damage based on St or something else. I don't know. Or, make up an entirely new stat called "Defense".

Honestly, it becomes a bit of a pain to mess with in order to keep some balance between the stats, leading me to believe that basing normal "passive" Defense on Ag is bad and basing it only on the armor is good. I might, however, think that making the bonus applied by the Active Defense cards should vary based on your stat. For example, an Ag 5 PC should dodge better than an Ag 3 PC, or a St 5 should parry better than St 3. Yet, currently, they provide the same bonus ( ).

I honestly agree with Gallows. Passive Defense in WFRP is in the armor. Active defense, such as dodging or parrying, uses the defense action cards. If you don't use the dodge action card, then why should your agility (as a 'passive dodge') in particular apply more than, say, your St (as a 'passive parry')? The answer is, it shouldn't. Remember that St isn't just raw physical power, it also represents the person's natural ability/skill using a melee weapon. Thus, a higher St PC has a better chance of hitting than a lower St PC. It stands to reason, then, that such a person could and probably would use his St to parry or deflect enemy attacks more than try to avoid them with their agility.

dvang said:

Yeah it is, but this is because I had to fit in small number, and at the same time make sure, that more expensive armors are better, than cheaper ones.

In core book Robes have the same defence values as plate, and leather the same soak as mail shirt, that is silly too.

Its cost vs reward thing.

My approach was:

Robes: hmmm... they are long, thick and rolled, so it can impede your movement, and at the same time add some soak.

Brigandine: this is a cloth garnet lined with small oblong steel plates riveted to the fabric (according to wikipedia), so it does not impede movement much, but offer some protection.

Getting down with it to small numbers (I wanted to fit with 0 to -2 in defence case, and 0-5 in soak case), and taking costs and availability into consideration I came up with the numbers as they are.

As to the agility, I will try to answer that later, when I check some numbers (especially in case of some "vs Target Defence" spells), but thats no sooner than in the evening (morning here, just goint for work, and gym after that, so don't expect anwer sooner than in 12-14 hours)

dvang said:

I agree with you. It should also be noted that the Ag 5 PC will theoretically dodge better than the AG3 since he has access to the improved dodge card (if he buys it and has Coordination). He is also far more likely to have access to the Coordination skill (agility based careers often have it as career skill) and is in that case adding 2 when using the basic dodge card. It becomes even clearer when you compare to the Ag2 character who doesn't even get the basic dodge card.

gruntl said:

Exactly. There is a card for basic agility of 3 that gets improved with a skill trained. At agility 4 you get the improved card. That's progression of defence through the logically connected stats. It's very well balanced. Now at agility/strenght/toughness 5 you could give the players a new card or create one for them. A more simple approach would be to add an extra misfortune die whenever using an improved defence card with a characterist of 5. Then at six I can imagine an expert card that adds two challenge dice when using the defence card. The sums up to being +4d if you have 10 in a characteristic. That isn't al all unreasonable.

Defence card power based on characteristic:

1-2 = none

3 = 1 or 2 misfortune

4 = 1 challenge

5 = 1 challenge + 1 misfortune

6 = 2 challenge

7 = 2 challenge + 1 misfortune

8 = 3 challenge

9 = 3 challenge + 1 misfortune

10 = 4 challenge

I think that's balanced and I can imagine it's something along those lines we'll see from FFG. I don't like a passive defence based on characteristics because it seems illogical. Defence is always active, unless it's because of something you are wearing. I think the whole misunderstanding with armor defence being like THAC0 in D&D. It's not. It's 1 misfortune die at most from armor and one from a shield and it's effect on the outcome is minor. But it does help balance damage a bit because it can limit boons and thus limit damage... like armor is supposed to.

Someone not using a defence card should be super easy to hit and if you're on the front lines you better make sure you have 3+ in all your physical characteristics, so you can defend yourself.

Unlike Gallows, I personally think, that Passive Defence is a must in P&P RPG.

It takes care of every small bit in a fight that is happening, but is not directly covered by the rules (like constant moving, people bumping of themselves, sheer experience in positioning in a way to be harder to hit).

Maybe basing defence on one characteristic (especially, if it becomes a god one) is not a best idea, but I will definitely use some kind of Passive Defence along with Active Defence no matter what (just not sure how to do it yet).

Here is one example why:

Experienced figher, veteran of many battles: Strength 5, Agility 3, Toughness 4, Weapon Skill trained 3 times, caught in a dark alley without armor, shield, or weapon (for examples sake), sober.
He has only his fists to use.
Attacking him are 4 thugs with maces, Strength 4, no Weapon Skill trained (total newbies). Avg damage on fighter 5.

Now:
Fighter can not block (no shield), can not parry (no weapon), and his dodge can be used once per 2 rounds.
Normal difficulty to hit him is 1 <P>, so every thug roll will be like: 1 purple <P>, 3 blue <B> and 1 red ®. Chance to hit is 0.74.
Once per 2 rounds a fighter can dodge making ONE thug roll a: 1 purple <P>, 1 black , 3 blue <B> and 1 red ®. Chance to hit is 0.65.

Its like he couldn't defend himself at all...
In normal life such veteran wouldn't have a sweat tearing a smile of their faces, in this case he's defenceless.

To give him some better chance of survival, he needs a Passive Defence that covers his experience in some way.

I did not finished tests on the agility based defence, but when I was going today for work another idea struck me.
I put it in a pdf on the web, in case I forgot how it goes.

You can find it here, if you like: www.gmtools.excelocms.com/download/defences.pdf