7 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:

Since you suggest the game needs more low-impact ways to burn off strife, I wonder what you think the writers were trying to implement when it comes to strife as a concept. In my experience strife is already too inconsequential to matter, never mind if PCs get even more ways to get rid of it.

Just to be clear, these are ways to reduce strife (stress) that are socially acceptable.

At least in my game they would require Role-playing. you just don't say I'm going to the Geisha and get a reduction in strife.

1 minute ago, tenchi2a said:

Just to be clear, these are ways to reduce strife (stress) that are socially acceptable.

At least in my game they would require Role-playing. you just don't say I'm going to the Geisha and get a reduction in strife.

Let me rephrase: do you think the writers’ idea of strife is that it’s a concept around which a narrative is built, or is it just a game representation of stress? Because the first requires it to have a meaningful impact, the second doesn’t.

Just now, nameless ronin said:

Let me rephrase: do you think the writers’ idea of strife is that it’s a concept around which a narrative is built, or is it just a game representation of stress? Because the first requires it to have a meaningful impact, the second doesn’t.

I see it as more of a mechanical impact, that if not managed can bleed over into the narrative impact.

It is useful to be mildly stressed in some situations and some samurai have learned to channel that stress. see Lion's

or some samurai can from their training have a calming effect on others. see Phoenix.

To me the issues would come from the role-playing side.

when the stress that has been built up mechanically combines with the stress that has been generated by role-playing.

This to me is where the drama lies.

Let also say that I am not one who believes that drama shouldV be forced.

To me the characters are quite good at causing drama without the games assistance.

And yes I can see where this can defang strife when these stress relievers are readily available.

But if they are readily available strife should not be a problem in the game anyway.

The times were strife/stress should come into effect is when there is no way to let of steam other then the ways presented.

On the battlefield, in the shadowland, etc.

3 hours ago, tenchi2a said:

I was suggesting that one of the Success sides would be a 2xSuccess, this I believe this would allow for a better upper level scaling in the system. As to the d6 I would

say it only needs to be done on the skill die (d12). Now I could be wrong.

I don't know how much of a difference that makes. I tend to use 5k3 as the default because that's where a starting- to low-rank character will be seeing many of their rolls.

Currently, it generates 2.67 Successes with an 18% chance of at least 1 explosive success (3.67 Successes)

A 2xSuccess face on the Skill Die (8.3% probability per die rolled) only adds .33 Successes to the roll, bringing the average roll for 5k3 up to 3.0 Expected Successes. This does little more than skew the TNs even further. TN2 remains "Little Expectation of Failure" and TN 4 becomes the new "Challenging" TN. Does this really fix anything though? It certainly makes TN as the "Default TN" even more problematic, but TN3 is still super-hard for anyone with an "Xk2 roll" The game's biggest issue is that the TN difficulty is not very broad, and as such the swings on a +/-1 are so much more dramatic. If you have TN2, but a 5k3 roll has no expectation of failure at that TN, Opportunities suddenly will become far more commonplace, and Kept Strife far lower, making the Composure Game that much more inane book-keeping, lol.

6 hours ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

Funny how you claim the sunk cost fallacy isn't a "true" fallacy (as if that's a thing) but then use this fallacy to anchor your argument.

It isn't.

It was, however, an observation that the claim the released DH 2E was a total failure doesn't match what I've seen nor experienced.

9 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

What you know as Dark Heresy 2 is Only War With Inquisitors, and not the original, completely revamped, totally original system. The two are vastly different. It is like 5R5 (the dumped DH2 Beta) vs 4th Edition with some bling (the Dark Heresy 2 you know).

This is pretty much the point @TheVeteranSergeant tries to make.

He also claimed that the released was a failed line.

I've seen no evidence of same.

1 hour ago, tenchi2a said:

Let also say that I am not one who believes that drama shouldV be forced.

To me the characters are quite good at causing drama without the games assistance.

I thought at first that strife mechanic was annoying me because it removed player agency to force drama. But I think in the end it annoys me more because it makes the mechanics focus on small break of On manifestation like outburst that I find not much interesting. Drama isn't how you react to an event but what lead to the event.

I don't find exciting drama in the expression of daily struggle, that make you build on stress until you have a small outburst and then, hop until the next one. Interesting drama is a stoic samurai's long term hunt against the killer of his lord ending in him being powerless to take action due to a rogukani cultural specificity. Maybe then he should have an outburst, a proper one. Not because the dice said so, but because the player is pretty pissed off.

Maybe a game in the game about loss of On could be interesting, practiced by courtier, where loss of face in public would actually matter.

2 hours ago, tenchi2a said:

Let also say that I am not one who believes that drama shouldV be forced.

To me the characters are quite good at causing drama without the games assistance.

And yes I can see where this can defang strife when these stress relievers are readily available.

But if they are readily available strife should not be a problem in the game anyway.

The times were strife/stress should come into effect is when there is no way to let of steam other then the ways presented.

On the battlefield, in the shadowland, etc.

That’s certainly a good approach, but it’s not what the writers appear to have chosen. Which always ends up being the major hiccup for me in the design: they chose to build the system around ever-present strife as a narrative core, incorporating several mechanics and the dice system to support it, but it doesn’t pay out. And if it doesn’t pay out, those mechanics just become annoyances that detract from immersion. There’s a bunch of narrative mechanics to track and to spend time on during the game, but I’m not getting a narrative result for my efforts.

2 hours ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

I don't know how much of a difference that makes. I tend to use 5k3 as the default because that's where a starting- to low-rank character will be seeing many of their rolls.

Currently, it generates 2.67 Successes with an 18% chance of at least 1 explosive success (3.67 Successes)

A 2xSuccess face on the Skill Die (8.3% probability per die rolled) only adds .33 Successes to the roll, bringing the average roll for 5k3 up to 3.0 Expected Successes. This does little more than skew the TNs even further. TN2 remains "Little Expectation of Failure" and TN 4 becomes the new "Challenging" TN. Does this really fix anything though? It certainly makes TN as the "Default TN" even more problematic, but TN3 is still super-hard for anyone with an "Xk2 roll" The game's biggest issue is that the TN difficulty is not very broad, and as such the swings on a +/-1 are so much more dramatic. If you have TN2, but a 5k3 roll has no expectation of failure at that TN, Opportunities suddenly will become far more commonplace, and Kept Strife far lower, making the Composure Game that much more inane book-keeping, lol.

Here the thing I'm not sure if it scales down, but the game seems to follow a TN1 = TN5 pattern when compared to 3rd/4th edition.

all the TN levels seem to correspond, but I feel the percentages are off. Now that could just be me reading to much in to this.

Also When I was thinking about the correlations it dawned on me that and explosion in 4th is hitting a TN 10 so wouldn't that be the best place for the double success?

Lets take your 5K3 example and run with it.

4th edition with 5k3 and exploding dice, emphasis not included due to lack of equivalent in the beta

TN 5 = 100%

TN 10 = 99%

TN 15 = 93%

TN 20 = 72%

TN 25 = 42%

TN 30 = 24%

What would be the beta equivalent percentages?

TN 1

TN 2

TN 3

TN 4

TN 5

TN 6

I believe for Skill 2, Ring 3 (keeping 3 dice, and rolling a total of 5) the chances are approximately:

TN1: 98%; TN2 87%; TN3: 65%; TN4: 28%; TN5: 10%; TN6: 3%

I computed these by randomly rolling a few thousand times with a keep heuristic that optimized for successes. In practice, players may pick more opportunities, or may prefer to avoid taking the strife.

13 minutes ago, ubik2 said:

I believe for Skill 2, Ring 3 (keeping 3 dice, and rolling a total of 5) the chances are approximately:

TN1: 98%; TN2 87%; TN3: 65%; TN4: 28%; TN5: 10%; TN6: 3%

I computed these by randomly rolling a few thousand times with a keep heuristic that optimized for successes. In practice, players may pick more opportunities, or may prefer to avoid taking the strife.

While not an optimal way to get the percentages it does show what I was driving at.

in the beta the percentages drop off like a rock after TN 2 where in 4th is doesn't start to drop off until TN 20 which if it follow the breakdown is TN 4.

21 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

While not an optimal way to get the percentages it does show what I was driving at.

in the beta the percentages drop off like a rock after TN 2 where in 4th is doesn't start to drop off until TN 20 which if it follow the breakdown is TN 4.

I don’t think it’s directly comparable like that. The TNs in 4E take into account that players might want to make Raises, while the beta doesn’t have Raises. It makes sense for the odds to drop off earlier in the beta. More so if strife results are supposed to be regularly needed for successes, which I expect is the case.

What is definitely true is that TNs are much less granular than in previous editions. It is hard to fine tune as a +/-1 TN can really make the odds of success swing widely. There is no in-between while in 4e or before, you could have much finer control.

Actually, the mechanic for 4E doesn't really take into account Raises all that well, because +5TN has a bigger impact across some parts of the TN spectrum, and players who figure out the odds will realize when they can Raise and when they can't and still maintain a reasonable chance at success. Raises basically just existed to let higher-skill/Ring players do cooler things on routine checks with a slight gamble. If you were declaring a raise on your 5k3 TN20 (-30%) check, it was a great deal riskier than taking a raise on a TN10 check (-6%).

It's just that on a numerical D10, you can roll a 6 and effectively have half a success, whereas you can only get a 1 or a 0 on the narrative dice (with that 8.3-9.7% chance of explosive success). The ability to get "partial successes" flattens out the curve a little on far end. An exploding 10 can be as little as 11, or as much as 20+. But it's always more than 10. The exploding narrative die will still just be a 1 50% of the time on a D6 and 42% of the time on a D12.

3 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:

I don’t think it’s directly comparable like that. The TNs in 4E take into account that players might want to make Raises, while the beta doesn’t have Raises. It makes sense for the odds to drop off earlier in the beta. More so if strife results are supposed to be regularly needed for successes, which I expect is the case.

I would have to ask have you played 4th ed? Not saying you haven't but this seem to be a common perception among players that haven't.

Raises to the best of my knowledge are build into the game as a extra gamble for players. There is no effort made to make them easier to achieve in 4th.

They are a bonus to higher level characters to add something to a roll that this normally a sure thing.

In truth most players will never use a raise unless it is necessary to achieve and effect or they are shugenja trying to amplify a spell.

An example being "The Way of the Lion"technique, if they geared the game for raises this ability would be way more overpowered then it already is.

Now on to the beta.

All I see the beta drop-off doing is making under skilled samurai and forcing the GM to keep the TNs low so they can achieve their goal.

This takes away flexibility and any sense of true advancement for you xp expenditure.

2 minutes ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

Actually, the mechanic for 4E doesn't really take into account Raises all that well, because +5TN has a bigger impact across some parts of the TN spectrum, and players who figure out the odds will realize when they can Raise and when they can't and still maintain a reasonable chance at success. Raises basically just existed to let higher-skill/Ring players do cooler things on routine checks with a slight gamble. If you were declaring a raise on your 5k3 TN20 (-30%) check, it was a great deal riskier than taking a raise on a TN10 check (-6%).

It's just that on a numerical D10, you can roll a 6 and effectively have half a success, whereas you can only get a 1 or a 0 on the narrative dice (with that 8.3-9.7% chance of explosive success). The ability to get "partial successes" flattens out the curve a little on far end. An exploding 10 can be as little as 11, or as much as 20+. But it's always more than 10. The exploding narrative die will still just be a 1 50% of the time on a D6 and 42% of the time on a D12.

LOL I was posting that just as your post came up

That is one of the odd facets of this game design... Its not designed to scale purely by increasing TN. Its designed to scale by putting the player behind a wall of success AND opportunity. It doesn't matter that a player can achieve the measly 2 TN to hit a character if they don't also get the 2 Opportunities to crit them, or to bypass their resistance.

I think the biggest problem I have with the beta is the removal of raises. I've said it many times but having Opportunities tacked on after the roll really changes the gaming experience. Rather than a player being creative and posing their in-character action to the GM with narrative goals the player must pose a simple approach, hit a basic TN, and then randomly receive some Opportunities to actually make things happen.

Typically you don't want to make things harder for your players by simply increasing the TN to accomplish a task. What you want to do is let them get involved by giving them a problem and letting them brainstorm their solution. At least with my players, the combination of void points and raises allowed many creative solutions to the problems I gave them. This doesn't work with the way the game functions currently...

More than that - for all of the broad mechanics of rings and skills, the bulky technique spread of Opportunities more than makes up for that saved paper space by making a player manage several pages of techniques and opportunity actions... This is probably the worst part of the system. The player gets to customize their character by buying the techniques they want, sounds good right? Except they can't perform actions that I would consider basic game functionality without grabbing the associated techniques, and then they have to manage a 4 page character sheet...

Another option I was thinking of was get rid of Opportunities on the dice.

(Stopping to dodge pitchforks and torches.)

And replace them with a success.

We all know that Opportunities are this games Raise but applied after the roll. You even have to give up a success to use the harking back to my TN1 = TN5 post.

So why not go all the way and have one bonus success be convertible into one Opportunities.

This will allow lower level PCs to use it as a success and higher level PCs to convert it to an Opportunity.

Just a thought.

21 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

I would have to ask have you played 4th ed? Not saying you haven't but this seem to be a common perception among players that haven't.

Raises to the best of my knowledge are build into the game as a extra gamble for players. There is no effort made to make them easier to achieve in 4th.

They are a bonus to higher level characters to add something to a roll that this normally a sure thing.

In truth most players will never use a raise unless it is necessary to achieve and effect or they are shugenja trying to amplify a spell.

An example being "The Way of the Lion"technique, if they geared the game for raises this ability would be way more overpowered then it already is.

Now on to the beta.

All I see the beta drop-off doing is making under skilled samurai and forcing the GM to keep the TNs low so they can achieve their goal.

This takes away flexibility and any sense of true advancement for you xp expenditure.

Depending on what it is I’m trying to do, I might well call a Raise that drops my chance of success from over 75% to low 60s. The only question is whether the additional value is worth going for or not. If finding an extra clue means the investigation actually goes somewhere, I’ll take that shot. If making a good enough forgery means I’m gettin to go where I need to go without alerting those I don’t want to know, I’ll try it. If I can't win a competition without making X Raises, why bother making a pointless attempt? There are lots of reasons to want to call a Raise or two even if that means a near-certainty becomes more of a coin flip.

As for the beta, the curve is actually comparable enough to 4E’s. It’s just shifted one instance. Does that matter? I kinda doubt it, given that TN 5 and TN 10 are virtually the same thing most of the time in 4E - barring characters who are terrible at whatever it is they’re trying to do or are suffering penalties.

1 minute ago, nameless ronin said:

Depending on what it is I’m trying to do, I might well call a Raise that drops my chance of success from over 75% to low 60s. The only question is whether the additional value is worth going for or not. If finding an extra clue means the investigation actually goes somewhere, I’ll take that shot. If making a good enough forgery means I’m gettin to go where I need to go without alerting those I don’t want to know, I’ll try it. If I can't win a competition without making X Raises, why bother making a pointless attempt? There are lots of reasons to want to call a Raise or two even if that means a near-certainty becomes more of a coin flip.

Did you not use void points with raises? Did you use simple TN challenges with obvious approaches, and not have puzzling encounters like characters who are easier to kill with called shots, or after cutting armor, or forcing them into bad terrain?

5 hours ago, nameless ronin said:

I don’t think it’s directly comparable like that. The TNs in 4E take into account that players might want to make Raises, while the beta doesn’t have Raises. It makes sense for the odds to drop off earlier in the beta. More so if strife results are supposed to be regularly needed for successes, which I expect is the case.

Functionally, the opportunities can function much like raises. Had a player try something that needed 2 opp to succeed, and he rolled non. Even with his advantage, and then disadvantage, triggering, no opportunites on his TN1 OppNeeded 2 roll. A beautiful cast... that dissipated before hitting.

3 hours ago, Soshi Nimue said:

Did you not use void points with raises? Did you use simple TN challenges with obvious approaches, and not have puzzling encounters like characters who are easier to kill with called shots, or after cutting armor, or forcing them into bad terrain?

Quick response before going to work:

Since my personal playing experience was called into question, my examples are from skills I was involved in as a player. That said, TNs are often determined by the player as much as the GM: you choose what you do after all, and often you have more than one option to try so you can pick the one with the best odds.

Void is great when you can spare it, but I normally do a lot more skill checks than I have VP to use in a session. Void is for the important rolls that I really don’t want to miss, not for every check.

I picked three examples to illustrate three different situations. To be clear: if not contested, we usually disclose the TN of a check or at least give a good indication of how hard or easy it is (though it depends a little bit on each GM’s preference). And in my opinion at least, succeeding a roll is not always important - sometimes you just try again or do something different. In those cases, taking a little risk to get a bigger payout if you’re successful is a good strategy.

For Investigation checks, I’ve called Raises to for instance speed up searching a room when I wanted to find something before an NPC joined me on the scene or to try and get more information from someone I was interrogating. Completely standard way of doing those checks: fixed TN to search the room completely, Raises to do it faster; contested roll for the interrogation, Raises to get more information than with a simple success. Failure means not getting the room searched before the NPC shows up or not getting any info at all respectively, but neither has to be the end of the world: in the first case I’d just have to share my findings instead of choosing if I wanted to keep something to myself, in the second I’d have to find another way to figure out what’s going on (maybe let another PC try Intimidation, for instance). Forging travelling papers has a fixed TN to create something that passes a normal inspection, but if you want them to be good enough to convince well-trained magistrates you either call Raises if the GM uses a fixed TN per NPC or you decide how high you want the roll to be for you to consider it good enough if the GM chooses to make it contested. In practice it comes down to the same thing (and it’s a good example of a check you can probably retry if you’re not happy with the result, so there’s no reall risk involved in calling Raises). Getting past a guard unseen might give me two options: a high TN Stealth check to sneak by or a lower TN check to climb over a wall, but needing a Raise to do it quietly or fast enough to be over it before a patrol returns. Depending on whichever gives me the highest effective TN, it might be less risky to try climbing even if that involves a Raise.

Missing because you called a Raise or two is not the end of the adventure: just look for a different way to do what needs doing. Being extra successful because you called a Raise or two on the other hand can help you get ahead significantly. And sometimes calling a Raise is simply the least risky or even the only possibility. Given those possible outcomes, I think I’d be foolish not to take a slightly bigger gamble every now and then.

I am enjoying playing 5e. The core rules work wonderfully well.

There are issues though. The most glaring ones are in writing clearly, organization, examples and explaining RAI.

Approaches don't pose a problem, but I have found we are going more and more for the 7th Sea way of doing it. A good description trumps everything, so mostly fiction first and gm decides based on that, mostly following the player.

There were no real issues with character generation. We did move the heritage table to one of the first steps though, just after Clan & Family. Overall, with some starting xp doesn't seem more restrictive then 4e to me.

Turning strife into roleplay obviously requires buy-in from the players, as does any mechanic. My players have experience with taking cues from the more abstract, meta-mechanics and translating them into rp and using them to drive narrative, but I have some struggle more with this as others, stating it interferes with staying in character. I am playing with making giri/ninjo conflicts and disadvantages coming into play impact strife generation the most.

Makes it matter, and more dangerous when it's appropriate and turns it more concrete at the same time, as well as make it a non-issue when it does not.

It don't like the movement rules, so, they got replaced by a zone system.

Void generation has been divorced from disadvantages and returned to the 'old' system. Sleep refills the pool and meditation and tea ceremony downtime actions restore 1. Don't mind the mechanic per se, but everyone at my table agreed it just didn't feel like void anymore and that that matters.

Duels don't really work for us. It's easy for them to drag and they are rarely exciting. They need some sort of clock, like every round lowers TN/increases DV/Lethality.

Katana breaking has been given the boot by overwhelming demand. Razor-sharp is just lost and that's it.

Spell casting mishaps are not working as intended.

Of course there are imbalances with techniques/kata's/... but that's expected.

Anyway, overall we definitely are having fun with this game :-)

38 minutes ago, Doji Namika said:

Spell casting mishaps are not working as intended.

I have no words for how hard I want this one to be fixed. As well as assisting Invocations. I have received some pretty darn terrible experiences in my last session about these two.