was wonderign I have a player whos playing a grey mage and last session he cast a spell that gave him fear rating ...

Tbh I had until now always doen the fear cheks Once at start of encounter with whatever gave the fear ... but his spell is ongoing ...

Does this mean fear has to be chekked each round ?

The rules are a little vague, not just with that card, but with Fear in general, and other Actions that grant it.

My interpretation is that you make your Discipline check against the Fear upon first encountering the critter which has fear, and don't normally have to roll again. If that's the case, then the main benefit of getting Fear for more than a single action would be for if the enemy got reinforcements, or if you wanted to prepare your horrifying visage ahead of the encounter or before doing something else with it.

That said, there may be situations where I'd make someone take a Fear test a second time. Like if you tried to flee, but they caught up with you again. Or if the gates slammed closed, and now you're trapped in the courtyard with the Fearful monster.

Leaving that sort of thing open also allows the GM to also use it to reward players whose characters can cause Fear. If they come up with some clever stunt or cool idea, you can have the NPCs roll again.

Of course, there's some danger with this sort of precedent, as you don't want to create a situation where the GM has painted themselves into a corner. Like if the monster has knocked out 3 PCs, and the 4th is now all "alone" with the wounded monster. A fear test right then could easily result in a TPK, which may or may not be something your play group is comfortable with.

Alternately, you could just give them a Fortune die on other intimidating actions made while they still have the Fear rating. A single fortune die is a small enough boost it won't break anything.

RAW on page 66 makes it pretty clear that it should only make a check at the first confrontation with a monster with a fear or terror rating or situation. you could house rule that in order to affect fear again on the same opponent because of an unusual circumstance or extreme cleverness (a cool idea) it has to be after a rally step which you control. you just want to avoid something dumb, like r_b_ bergstrom said, where you scare an opponent, close a door, and scare them again when you open it. it breaks RAW and it is obviously stupid. and i don't know how i feel about letting each cult mutant in a group of four all inflicting fear making PCs roll discipline four times, as they come through a door one by one. otoh, a fear rating of 1 should be easy to beat, even four times with a medium willpower, or you can make the check once per type and add misfortune dice for each additional dude of that type.

Bindlespin said:

For multiple opponents with the Fear rating I'd just up the difficulty, following the principle outlined by being outnumbered or with henchment units getting bonus dice due to their numbers. Definitely not rolling multiple times, but rather just increasing the difficulty for each additional member that has a fear rating.

Surely a group of scary things is much scarier than just one of them.

In my game I add those black dices to Discipline test against fear for each creature with the fear aspect in the scene.

Creatures with Fear/terror use it for free when the encounter start. They may try to use it more in the same encounter by spending a manoeuver to do so, like if they were using a skill. That's a cool mechanic because maneuver are rare for NPCs (no fatigue to spend to get more maneuver -> direct wounds).

There is actually a very simple reason why this ability is ongoing. If you generate two or more Banes on a Fear check you then gain the Frightened status effect. The Duration of the effect is is depentant upon being exposed to the object generating the Fear, so if some bad guys become Frightened when they make their Fear checks, they will only stay Frightened for the duration of the spell, once the spell expires, so will the Frightened status. In addition any new baddies that show up during the duration of the spell will have to make Fear checks as well.

Normally I wouldn't make the Fear check more difficult just for them having extra friends along. I mean, Zombies are normally Fear 1, but have a special rule that says 'Fear 2 if they outnumber the PCs', which would imply that's a special circumstance. You definitely do not roll separately for each source of fear.

And as stated, Fear-giving ability duration is there to make use of the Frightened condition if they stay engaged with the object of their fear. Though the rules seem to imply that after you've gotten scared, you can just disengage, and then you can face them easy-peasy afterwards (since Frightened only lasts as long as you stay engaged with them)... which is a little weird.

Juriel said:

Makes perfect sense to me, my wife is scared silly by spiders, if she sees ones, she jumps back a few feet and yells at me until I make it go away.

In game terms, she disengages from the spider until the source of fear is removed.

Seems to me like the Status effect works just fine!!

Maybe there should be a "Terrified" status effect that causes you to flee catatonically and bable in a corner drewling all over yourself, or involunartily evacuating your bowls, but they don't have that effect....hmm, involunartily evactuate bowls, that sounds like a choas star result for fear just waiting to happen!!!

Ongoing fear affecting each round would be too powerful, a good Grey Mage would be dealing damage to everything on the board each round. As the rules state, fear/terror only affects targets once when encountered first time and not subsequent rounds, and it is per creature/npc. Multiple creatures with fear would just cause multiple rolls, which effectively does make them a more terrifying group, no need to up the difficulty. More rolls, more chances of group building up stress and becoming frightened.

i mostly agree with you panzerkraken, but think about how many rolls are going to have to be made. 3 pcs vs 4 cult mutants means that the party would have to roll 12 times just to resolve fear. this only get worse if you keep adding enemies. "fear of undeath" is revealing too. personally, i think i will resolve fear and terror once per source. that is, if chaos spawn and mutants attack together then everyone has to check just twice regarrdless of the number of mutants and spawn.

@Juriel & BCA: i see where you guys are coming from and the rules support you, especially since the example of dependent conditions is discussing "frightened" explicitly, but again i think i am going to do things slightly differently. a) only if you fail a fear check and generate two or more banes do you gain frightened, and b) "frightened" should not be dependant upon being engaged with anything, but its effects should, which means that frightened won't go away when you disengage, you just don't take a stress each turn and you can convert die as normal. as things are, if you stay disengaged then frightened ends at the end of that turn, which is not awful. the character, like BCA's wife, is taking a turn to recover its wits. I just want "frightened" to last a little longer. So instead, the source of fear or terror will have to be eliminated or safely run away from, i.e the players can recover from frightened automatically during a rally step.

i like the idea of a further "terrified" condition card a lot, lol. or a monster action called "scare them *#!@less," one success = all pcs immediately evacuate their bowels and sufer two stress, two successes = suffer an additional stress, chaos star = monster scares itself and is also forced to dump itself, encounter ends immediately so everyone can go home and shower.

Well, this forum sucks for posting this kind of info, but here goes. You should be able to paste it into some sort of spreadsheet to make it more readable.

Basically these two tables list the probability of succeeding on a set Terror rating against a certain number of PC's based on the character's Willpower rating.

This is based on the probability of having to roll N times per each NPC with a Terror characteristic, and it assumes all monsters in the group have the same Terror level. You could just roll one d100 and roll under the stated % to figure this out, and save yourself the hassle of N rolls of the same dice pool.

So a PC with Will 5 against 4 NPC's has a 43.58% of passing the test (would fail on a roll higher than 43), whereas someone with Willpower 2 has a 3.66% (would fail on a roll higher than 4). Good luck on that!

Terror 1 1 NPCs 2 NPCs 3 NPCs 4 NPCs 5 NPCs 6 NPCs 7 NPCs
1 Will 25.00% 6.25% 1.56% 0.39% 0.10% 0.02% 0.01%
2 Will 43.75% 19.14% 8.37% 3.66% 1.60% 0.70% 0.31%
3 Will 59.38% 35.26% 20.94% 12.43% 7.38% 4.38% 2.60%
4 Will 71.88% 51.67% 37.14% 26.70% 19.19% 13.79% 9.91%
5 Will 81.25% 66.02% 53.64% 43.58% 35.41% 28.77% 23.38%
6 Will 87.89% 77.25% 67.89% 59.67% 52.44% 46.09% 40.51%

Terror 2 1 NPCs 2 NPCs 3 NPCs 4 NPCs 5 NPCs 6 NPCs 7 NPCs
1 Will 12.50% 1.56% 0.20% 0.02% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
2 Will 25.00% 6.25% 1.56% 0.39% 0.10% 0.02% 0.01%
3 Will 38.28% 14.65% 5.61% 2.15% 0.82% 0.31% 0.12%
4 Will 51.17% 26.18% 13.40% 6.86% 3.51% 1.80% 0.92%
5 Will 62.70% 39.31% 24.65% 15.46% 9.69% 6.08% 3.81%
6 Will 72.36% 52.36% 37.89% 27.42% 19.84% 14.35% 10.39%

Since some people seem to be handling that way, I will point out that making PCs roll a Fear check against each individual source of Fear would be dumb.

It'd mean that a couple of Fear 1 little critters cause fear a lot more reliably than a single Fear 3 arch-demon, which is quite counter to how it should be.

Makes perfect sense to me, my wife is scared silly by spiders, if she sees ones, she jumps back a few feet and yells at me until I make it go away.

Yes, she stays away from it. She doesn't jump back, then handle it with no problems the next second, right? The Frightened condition, by the book, evaporates after you're no longer engaged with the target of your fear... so that huge daemon may spook you out, but after you take a step back and rub your eyes, you can go back with no penalties.

I guess it'd be one turn when they aren't meleeing it, but most often Fear happens at range (when you first see a critter) and is mostly possessed by stuff you don't want to be meleeing in the first place. That is what makes the Frightened condition a bit silly.

I didn't think so, unfortunatley I don't have a copy of the frightened contidition card with me, I was pretty sure that the frightended condiditon stayed in effect for the entire act, or until the source of the fear was no longer present. Present, to me, is within extreme range, now you only suffer the bad stuff of the coniditon when you are engaged with the target, but when you aren't, it just doesn't go away does it???

Grrr, I hate not have the cards with me!!!

from page 69, "the Frightened status is a dependent effect - it lasts as long as the affected character is engaged with a target that has a Fear or Terror Rating. During the End of Turn phase, the circumstances for each dependent effect are checked. If the proper circumstances cease to exist, the dependent condition no longer applies and the card is returned to the proper deck."

which seems to mean that at the end of the turn if you are not engaged then Frightened ends.

the card states: "while engaged with a target that has a fear or terror rating, you convert one less characteristic die into a stance die. at the beginning of your turn, suffer one stress"