Guys, I got it; Advantage tokens!

Hear me out ... I love narrative dice, but rolling advantages often feels like a drag on the fun. When I get the book (today, tomorrow? ?) this is my plan to fix the system ?

I'll give my players advantage tokens when they roll advantages. They can keep them in a shared pool and spend them whenever.

(I'll also add black dice to most rolls just to make sure "remove black dice" effects don't go unused.)

Problem solved. Such win.

53 minutes ago, Kakita Shijin said:

Guys, I got it; Advantage tokens!

Hear me out ... I love narrative dice, but rolling advantages often feels like a drag on the fun. When I get the book (today, tomorrow? ?) this is my plan to fix the system ?

I'll give my players advantage tokens when they roll advantages. They can keep them in a shared pool and spend them whenever.

(I'll also add black dice to most rolls just to make sure "remove black dice" effects don't go unused.)

Problem solved. Such win.

You might want to consider excepting strain recovery, reduced purchase cost, crits, full auto, all other nasty weapon qualities, etc.

Oh, and something like the Tech going: " It's nigh midnight already; before we pack up: How many advantages have we accumulated so far? What piece of ridiculously overpowered equipment shall I craft now; how about a +7 kill-em-all battle axe, anybody interested?"

Indeed. The issue I'm trying to address is the disappointment of rolling advantages when you need successes instead ?

I don't think you understand the pile of tokens you may have, particularly once characters advance. A better idea is to tell them what Advantages are used for and to start thinking ahead for their own ideas on how to use them.

I think the point of advantage is to soften the blow when they don't succeed the check. Now, instead of getting some benefit from the roll, they get nothing and the story doesn't progress in any way. The idea behind this system is that something should happen on each roll.

3 hours ago, Kakita Shijin said:

I love narrative dice, but rolling advantages often feels like a drag on the fun

The advantages should relate to the roll they were done on. Accumulating them for use later is just arbitrary, and definitely not-narrative. If it's a drag on the fun, have a few defaults and save the narrative injection for when people are truly inspired. In EotE, it's Strain recovery or passing boost dice, or free Maneuvers, that's where the 1A or 2A usually go. If you don't have a need for those, then you're not causing enough Strain on the PCs, the encounters are too static, and ...nobody wants boost dice...??

3 hours ago, Kakita Shijin said:

When I get the book (today, tomorrow? ?) this is my plan to fix the system ?

Maybe what needs fixing is your use of the system...

3 hours ago, Kakita Shijin said:

Guys, I got it; Advantage tokens!

Hear me out ... I love narrative dice, but rolling advantages often feels like a drag on the fun. When I get the book (today, tomorrow? ?) this is my plan to fix the system ?

I'll give my players advantage tokens when they roll advantages. They can keep them in a shared pool and spend them whenever.

(I'll also add black dice to most rolls just to make sure "remove black dice" effects don't go unused.)

Problem solved. Such win.

This sounds like a cure that's worse than the disease.

4 hours ago, Kakita Shijin said:

I love narrative dice, but rolling advantages often feels like a drag on the fun.

I'm not sure I follow - having something good happen regardless of success or failure is impinging upon your fun? So you are looking to only have an axis of success or failure, but not the other two? Those are core to this system.... I'm not sure how you can love the Narrative Dice System without loving the 3 axes of dice results, but everyone's going to find their own way in the world.

5 hours ago, Kakita Shijin said:

I love narrative dice, but rolling advantages often feels like a drag on the fun.

What are you and your PCs spending Advantage on when you roll it? Can you provide some examples?

5 hours ago, Kakita Shijin said:

Indeed. The issue I'm trying to address is the disappointment of rolling advantages when you need successes instead ?

But that is the entire point of the dice system, to trigger events (good or bad) independent of whether the check succeeded. "Oh, you missed, but you missed because he tripped and your attack sailed over his head, but now he’s prone"

Remember they are not rolling advantages in place of successes. They are rolling advantages in addition to successes.

2 hours ago, Forgottenlore said:

But that is the entire point of the dice system, to trigger events (good or bad) independent of whether the check succeeded. "Oh, you missed, but you missed because he tripped and your attack sailed over his head, but now he’s prone"

That's how it's supposed to work, yeah. And sometimes it does, and it's fun. But what happens a lot (and not just in my games, mind you) is that players get bogged down having to be creative under pressure, or resign to just pass a blue die to the next player. It can be quite unfulfilling in practice.

Jay Little responded in an interview that one solution is to let players keep advantages instead of using them right away. Of course, he was talking about Star Wars. It could be they've addressed the issue already. My contribution is the idea of using physical tokens.

52 minutes ago, Kakita Shijin said:

But what happens a lot (and not just in my games, mind you) is that players get bogged down having to be creative under pressure, or resign to just pass a blue die to the next player. It can be quite unfulfilling in practice.

I'm assuming 'under pressure' refers to combat. There are a bunch of talents in SWRPG and now in Genesys which cost strain and advantages to use. I've found that once players lean into those Talents and start using them, spare advantages dry up because everone is using them up to activate an ability or to replenish strain so they can do so next turn. The strain/advantage economy is a big part of how Genesys combat gets tactical.

If your players have a bunch of spare advantages in combat they aren't taking advantage (har har) of all the tactical options available. And it isn't their fault: Genesys is new and weird. My players didn't for the first few sessions, until I had them make flash cards for their most tactical talents and keep them out on the table. I don't know if it'll help your players, but it did help mine get into the groove of using advantages all the time.

Stockpiling advantages, as others have said, will break a lot of things in the way Genesys works now, years after the launch of SWRPG. Crafting stupidly powerful stuff, being able to crit whenever you want, etc. doesn't contribute to fun at the table, it just makes the party into an unstoppable juggernaut. Story points are the in-game resource designed to be banked for later sometimes. Advantages are ephemeral, specific to the check, and should be used right away.

A friend of mine added a rule that once you have a 3 skill you could spend 5 advantage on a success, 4 skill dropped it to 4, and a 5 skill dropped it to 3. I really didn't change things much but kinda helped in those times when you get a rediculous amount of advantage and no success. It was also a nice way to get people out of 'just max out my attributes' line of thinking and working on their skills more. I enjoyed it.

3 hours ago, TheSapient said:

Remember they are not rolling advantages in place of successes. They are rolling advantages in addition to successes.

Quite often, you are literally rolling advantages instead of successes. They do come from the same dice, after all, and a die that rolls an advantage could have rolled a success instead. Or for that matter, a die that rolls a success-cancelling failure could have rolled an advantage-cancelling threat instead.

If you roll a bunch of times with a reasonably balanced dice pool (about as many good as bad dice), you'll find that a majority of the rolls either result in a failure with advantages, or a success with threats. By no means all rolls, but certainly more often than all-upside or all-downside.

1 hour ago, Kakita Shijin said:

But what happens a lot (and not just in my games, mind you) is that players get bogged down having to be creative under pressure, or resign to just pass a blue die to the next player. It can be quite unfulfilling in practice.

I think this is how it goes for everyone, especially in the beginning. But there's nothing wrong with passing a Boost to the next ally or a Setback to the next Enemy, it's all about describing it which I understand isn't everyone's idea of fun. I would like to say that in my experience with a couple groups playing the NDS system for a couple years now, it really does get easier with practice - but I would encourage you to run games however you like.

31 minutes ago, Dacke said:

Quite often, you are literally rolling advantages instead of successes. They do come from the same dice, after all, and a die that rolls an advantage could have rolled a success instead. Or for that matter, a die that rolls a success-cancelling failure could have rolled an advantage-cancelling threat instead.

If you roll a bunch of times with a reasonably balanced dice pool (about as many good as bad dice), you'll find that a majority of the rolls either result in a failure with advantages, or a success with threats. By no means all rolls, but certainly more often than all-upside or all-downside.

I was trying to get at the fact that advantages don't replace successes on the dice. They replace blank spaces. Players should not be disappointed with advantages. They should be happy they still got something good.

3 hours ago, Kakita Shijin said:

That's how it's supposed to work, yeah. And sometimes it does, and it's fun. But what happens a lot (and not just in my games, mind you) is that players get bogged down having to be creative under pressure, or resign to just pass a blue die to the next player. It can be quite unfulfilling in practice.

Not every dice pool has to be an Academy Award performance and it's ok to just keep saying things like kicking up sparks, spall, dirt in their eyes, etc. I don't beat anyone down over Advantages. If you roll 3 Triumphs we pause for some group thought.

In my fantasy game had a great pool on my goblin shaman they were fighting. He rolled a couple Successes, 2 Advantages, a Triumph, and two Despair. It was an easy call for me, but a fun pool.

NDS's sister system 2d20 has a mechanics for savings their version of advantages (momentum). In that system you can never have more than 6 momentum in the pool and you lose from the pool at the end of each round and each encounter/scene.

I'm confident particularly as characters advance they'll have no desire to bank Advantages. Between regaining Strain, passing along Boost dice, and stacking negative consequences on a particularly vicious monster, it doesn't make any sense to stack them.