I ran my play group through the bit of the "Eye for an Eye" adventure that came with the Core Set. It was our first experience playing WFRP3E, and in the days following the game, I asked some of the players what they thought of it.

One player remarked that the game seemed really difficult, and that he was failing most of his skill checks. In order to find out just how challenging the game actually was, I decided to carry out a little test.

I remembered reading that "average human" characteristic rating was three. For my test, I decided to find out what the success rate would be for an average characteristic attempting an Easy (1d) task. I picked up three blue characteristic dice and one purple challenge die, and I rolled this group of four dice 100 times, recording the number of successful and failed rolls as I went.

Now, part of the reason for this post is to compare expectations to actual rolls. So, before I post my results, I'd like to let this thread sit for a bit so that you can post your guesses about how many rolls out of 100 were successful under these circumstances. I'm curious to know how the other GMs here perceive the game's dificulty in this case, where an average characteristic without any skill training or fortune points will attempt an easy task.

So, go ahead and post your guess as to how many rolls out of 1o0 were successful (IE, at least one success symbol remained) using this combination of dice. Note that I'm ignoring banes, boons and chaos starts... I'm just counting up the hammers and the crossed swords, and determining whether or not the action succeeded or failed.

I'll return and post my results soon, and we'll see how everyone's guesses stacked up.

seventy two.....

100 rolls really isn't a reliable way to analyze dice rolls.

I rolled 10000 times and came up with 59.19%

That seems alright for a starting character.

But remember for combat you have stance dice, that are much better. You also have expertise dice from skills that are very good. If you try to do something with an average characteristic in a field you haven't trained for I actually find 59% to be a bit over the top.

Using my own house rules where a chaos star equals 2 challenges as well and a reroll of another challenge die I got 48% in 1d + 3 blue, which I find more reasonable.

Gallows, I slipped in something like your house rule to my players last session for the chaos star: Chaos star equals BOTH a challenge and a bane (unless there is a specific effect). I'm much more satisfied with starter characters now.

jh

Emirikol said:

Gallow's rule is quite excellent, on a math point of view (I tried it on a session yesterday).

But I also played today, trying hard to get on the narrative side of the Chaos Star.... Today I had so much fun to create complications and narratives elements with each Chaos Star that I wouldn't try that idea. I prefer let met succeed (chaos star = less challenge to negate success), but knowing that somehow, things are going nastier.

The answer was 51%, so not too far off from the 59% answered above.

How exactly did you roll 10,000 times? Did you use a piece of software to simulate the results? Or did you just have a lot of free time?

I have notified my players that chaos stars might not always have an effect straight away. That way it also gives me a few moments to come up with an effect if I can't think of something in the given situation.

Venthrac said:

You know, there's a closed (as opposed to iterative/simulated which your dice rolling is) mathematical expression for how many successes you would get. The expression itself is quite nasty and involves complicated use of the binomial distribution .

But luckily someone has already programmed this, here's link to the calculator:
http://www.jaj22.org.uk/wfrp/diceprob.html

Your 3 B vs 1 P has a success rate of 59%.

Venthrac said:

Hehe... rolling 10000 times in my free time

I used another dice roller for that result. But rolling 100 times could just as well give you 70% and if you want to do some modifications to the success rate then you should really use the online dice rollers because an error of about 10% could destroy the balance easily if you changed something based on that.

Well, 59% is not too bad then. I'll tell my complaining player who thinks the game is too hard that he actually has almost a 3-in-5 chance to succeed without any training or fortune points.

Venthrac said:

And if he buys just one skill rank, then he will have 73% chance. If he also gets a specialization it will be 79%. That's just two advancements. So no reason for him to complain.

Haha, thanks Gallows. I will do that.

Check the link in my sig for Sunatet's excellent dice roller. Even in batches of 100 (although I think he adjusted the number allowed now) it won't be too hard to do 10,000 rolls after only several minutes. It also keeps track of the results and numbers of various dice (et al).

Just so you know, the link I posted is not a dice roller, it's a probability calculator that calculates the exact (within rounding errors) probabilities. If you're only interested in successes (the calculator only does successes/challenges and boons/banes, not chaos stars or any of the exotic symbols) that calculator will be considerably faster than using a dice simulator to do 10000 rolls.

Sunatets dice roller is really nice when you want a more visual feel and want to look at the probabilities of getting certain combinations of symbols.