I've seen some discussion on "fixing" the so-called high hit percentage of a n00b character. What is it actually?

3 char dice

2 green dice

1 yellow

1 purple

In terms of D&D/d20, would a character have like a +8 to hit at "first level?"

jh

I haven't found it to be a very high chance. A 50% to 60% chance of success seems about typical for a starting character. Obviously, the chances are better if the character has put some points into combat abilities.

I don't think your example collection of dice is anything like the typical starting PC. You've got 5 characteristic dice showing (2 of which have been converted into stance dice), plus an expertise die. That's what I would expect for a character that's focused on combat, and so I think they should be hitting pretty often. But I find that most PCs are a bit more well-rounded than that.

Well, putting it through the dice probability code, gives a success (1 or more successes) rate of 93% (with a 4 score in the ability this goes down to 88%, the 2 conservative dice really help). Which is about the same as a +8 in d20 if trying to hit an AC of 10. But that comparison is pretty flawed. For starters, the "attack roll" in WFRP also determines the damage caused (at least to some extent), in DnD this is another roll that is not affected by the attack roll (unless you roll a crit or has some power/feat that can do that). Another problem is that wounds and hit points are really not comparable. WFRP is also, in my opinion, a much much more deadly system than DnD.

I think that the true chance of really succeeding with your attack in wfrp should be the chance of getting a critical. If you assume the dice pool above and using the standard melee attack card with a CR 3 weapon you have a chance of 38% to get at least one crit (if using the comets as crits and combining with boons). You should also never forget to include the defense of the monsters. Let them use active defenses and make sure to spend some aggression dice on defending.

Emirikol said:

Not to be picky, but you forgot the 1 black for base defense of 1. Gruntl is right...succeeding is not necessarily all you need in this system. You need typically more than one success to a significant amount of damage, otherwise you're slowly carving down wounds, like rolling a 1 on your damage die in d20 terms.

Also, the default difficulty is 1 purple. It does not have to be 1 purple, it can actually be higher, pending on how you want to set it. That is based on RAW, not the FAQ/Errata, which I believe goes against the spirit of the system in this regard and was a response to the public outcry when the game first came out: "what is the base difficulty to hit." The rules are explicit in their design that a task's difficulty is set by the GM prior to making the roll. All tasks/actions/skill checks, period. I don't see why we have one area that deviates so widely (other than convenience). I do like the default 1 purple and use it all the time.

The roll you've outlined above also does not factor in active defenses. Dodge/Parry/Block are all usable by NPC'S and can up to an additional 2 black per action, per check. It also does not factor in A/C/E, which is also a major consideration for the NOOB'S base chance to hit.

Basically, the point is, there is no easy translation and so much GM fiat goes into the rolls its hard to determine base percentage for a NOOB, unless you're assuming no modifiers are added in, then the default is 1 purple + 1 Black difficulty against x statistic.

A NOOB though in my book would only have a 3 strength, but that really doesn't fit the discussion...you're wondering about a combat max noob and so my answer is as it is.

Also, a thing to consider as I see you stacking greens. The delay can make you actually fail, as per the raw, as the attack falls too late. Also any good Noob should know the best way for the Noob to actually kill the guy with action cards would be reckless dice (unless at ranged) as most Melee cards are way better on the Reckless side. This drastically changes the success rate, by marginalizing boons with an increase bane percentage. The increase banes not only reduce damage, but also subtract a possible success off the die, thereby reducing hits and damage.

One major reason why I am fine with this difference is that Warhammer does not like to waste rounds missing. The RAW looks at combat in a new, and exciting way and by doing so it changes how the flow of combat functions and how frequently character's hit one another. Combat is reflective of not a single blow, but a series of blows (as per the RAW in the Adventurer's toolkit). So, where in most games we're used to a noob missing a turn or two then getting a good hit in, this system says each round is several rounds in a typical game, so cut out the fat and get to the meat...how much damage is dropped as a result of the blow rather than the minutia if the roll hits or not per x second turn. This is why cards like rapid fire and double strike and covering fire can function in one turn as much as a guy who runs, jumps over a gorge, draws a magic sword, climbs a tree, and ambushes an orc and still seem comfortable in the mechanic. Clearly all of those cards and that one action would take much longer to execute than a basic melee attack or time taken to Assess the Situation, but work because the system is not reflective of single-blow instants, but rather a series of time where the combat reflects narrative moments, the moment of the kill, the moment of a victory, the moment of defeat or death, etc. This is why the Henchmen rules don't bother me as it reflect the characters are fast to chew through and deliver a square mechanical, narrative concept with a single roll of a dice. Which is the same as saying, in this many rounds you hacked through twelve guys, now it's time to square off with a Rat Ogre and some quality Clan Rats. It simply has avoided turn by turn, mechanical roll-repetition to get to the meat of a scene via the most direct and important route (outcomes and choices rather than statistics and damage mitigation/output). All good fun to me and a welcome change.

Anyway, that's my two cents on the topic.

The hit probabilities are much higher than traditionally, but it is fine once you get your head around it. It's more fun to succeed than miss.

If you wish to calculate some exact probabilities and how each dice adjusts the difficultu you can use this generator

A very nice post by commoner, and I wholeheartedly agree with everything he wrote.

Mordjinn said:

I want to emphasis on this. I've played D&D (all editions) for years and when I was a player (most of the time I DMed) I always felt so useless when I missed, felt like Ive wasted everyone's time (but especially mine) having to choose what to do, exaplain how I want to do it, calculate all the bonuses/maluses just to throw a freaking dice and miss like 1/3 of the time.

I'm really happy with the higher chance of success of WHFRP. It feels way better to do just 1 point of damage on an average check than missing interely.

It is also very important to know that this system isn't all about combat (like D&D). A character can be very poor at combat and have as much fun in scenes where he's at his best. In my actual game, I play a Witch Hunter and have at best average skills in combat (not trained in either Balistic nor Weapon skill yet) and still have a lot of fun! Our party mostly try to avoid fights, since no one are that great (we still manage ourselves to kick some beastman and cultists arses from time to time! )

commoner said:

I can't recall anything in the RAW that supports this. Delay icons can screw up your future turns initiative, or deprive you of an offensive action for a round or two in the future because of recharge times, but I don't remember it ever saying that they can make your attacks fail.

Maybe I'm putting a literal reading on what you meant more figuratively?

Assuming I didn't miss something, you really don't have to buy very many action cards to be able to step around the big drawback of the green dice. They're much better than the red ones in my opinion.

Most melee action cards do more damage, and have better effects, or need fewer successes/boons, using the red side.

Losing Initiative, or gaining recharge tokens, can be pretty painful. More painful, often, than some fatigue/stress.

Both sides have pros and cons.

r_b_bergstrom said:

An evil GM will put the delay on active defenses (of which you can have a maximum of 3) or on action card that is most useful at the moment. Conservative dice are better if you only care about succeeding (i.e. getting 1 success) and want to play it safe, red dice are (exactly like described in the rules) the high risk - high gain option, where you will have a larger chance of getting 3+ successes and multiple boons.

Also, the really best (offensive) effects you can get from cards are on the reckless side. This is good, given that the drawbacks of being in reckless stance is considerably worse than the conservative ones.

Of to consult a manual, be back later with the source info...

gruntl said:

I'll grant you that the potency of delay icons is totally in the hands of the GM. If you game with a GM who feels his or her job is to kill or punish characters, they'll be much nastier than if you play with a GM who feels their job is to facilitate a good story or encourage maximum fun.

That said, If as a player I want to mitigate the impact of the less pleasant icons on the stance dice, it's much easier to render yourself immune to green than to red dice. I can spend 1 xp to gain an extra attack card, which essentially means it takes 1 more roll with a Delay icon before I'm shut down on attacks. To make it so that I can suck up one more Exertion icon, I have to raise at least one attribute, which means spending at least 2 xp and possibly much more. This is countered somewhat by the fact that your first fatigue or stress point has no impact, whereas the first delay will mess with your plans.

Your point about active defenses carries heftier weight, but has solutions as well. Anyone using Green dice a lot in melee should probably try to have a shield handy so they can Block. If you buy Advanced defenses, they can make up for having one locked down. The Dirty Tricks action is basically an extra defense. The rat-catcher's SBVD can boost defense. One of the less combat-oriented PCs can shore up that weakness for the whole group via Assess The Situation or Guarded Position. Etc. Exactly which options are available to you depend on character concept and stats, but again, for most characters the XP cost to mitigate the Delay Icon is less than the XP cost to mitigate the fatigue. Don't get me wrong, there's ways to get around fatigue and stress as well, but overall I think it's pretty balanced.

As you said, Red has a higher chance of delivering the high successes accompanied by some boons. However, it also has the higher chance of delivering banes (regardless of success or failure). I've run some pretty serious number-crunches on it, and come to the conclusion that if the Red and Green sides of the cards were identical, the Red dice would almost never be worth it. That's why the red sides of cards tend to look better than green, because you'll pay for all those goodies with more banes. Vegas casinos would love those red dice and cards, because they look so much sexier to the players than they actually are.

By Rank 2 at least you should be able to run just fine deep in the green. If you can get 2 yellow on a skill, it'll more than make up for not having the double-successes of a red die (you're only ever trying to get to 3 successes, after all), and make your boons much better as well. Each green die you add is always helping your odds, but that's not always the case with red dice. I've run some interesting graphs of the probabilities involved, if anyone's interested, check out transitivegaming.blogspot.com/2010/05/stance-matters.html

Of course, if you're using the higher-lethality options in the GM's toolkit, then that invalidates some of my argument. Without that optional rule, 6 successes and 2 banes is worse than 4 successes, so lots of red does you no good. With that rule, you'll often want the extra successes even if it does run a higher bane risk. That optional rule really changes the underlying math of the system.

All IMHO, YMMV, etc, and I do not pass judgment on anyone who prefers a particular die color or character build.

Given the immense opaque complexity of the dice mechanics in this game, I'm often surprised at just how balanced the dice and action card combined system is. Somebody over at FFG must have a strong math background.

r_b_bergstrom said:

As if those two things are mutually exclusive.

Emirikol said:

It's high compared to old WFRP, but not compared to many other games. The above character is about as good as it gets for a starting combat character and is attacking someone with little to no defences - pretty much a sitting duck. That attack should be almost guaranteed.

Compare that to, say, White Wolf - a starting combat character could easily have a Str of 3 or 4, Weapon 2 or 3, attacking with a sword for + 2... say 8 dice. Attacking someone with a defence of 2, that's 6 dice, or about 90%.

r_b_bergstrom said:

But that's the entire point. The red side is better on almost all offensive cards (and the offensive cards that are better at the greens side are invariably worse than the best redside cards, compare, e.g. Rapid Shot to Accurate shot). It's not only about what dice results you can get, but also what those results will get you.

I prefer conservative when playing, but that's because I like a balanced approach of defense and offense. If I wanted to play a crazed zealot with a twohanded warhammer optimized for doing a lot of damage, I would be in reckless stance all the time. Both for roleplaying reasons and mechanical.

Doc, the Weasel said:

I did not mean to imply they are mutually exclusive. Certainly, challenging your players is a frequent component of telling a good story and making sure everyone has fun. But I don't buy that the GM should always choose to utilize the most brutal option for the Delay Icons, as some (not necessarily you) seem to advocate. I see two reasons not to always go for the throat:

1) Pacing. If the battle's winding down, or is inconsequential to the plot, or the drunken goblin sentries got stupidly lucky and are now one attack roll away from a campaign-ending TPK that was never intended, then I usually won't pick the nastiest option for the player. If you constantly beat down your hardest, how can the players tell when you're building to climax?

2) Concept. The green dice / stance pieces are called "Conservative" because conceptually they represent the character being cautious and taking fewer risks. If they're trying to play it safe both in- and out- of-character, why should the GM look for the worst possible outcome he can hit them with. There are times where that's reasonable, if the PCs have made a horrible mistake, if they're facing the Big Bad, or if the situation is already dire for other dramatic or logical reasons. In general, though, if they're trying to minimize risk they should be allowed to do so. Always choosing to make the delay hurt them as much as mechanically possible seems to run contrary to what the stance represents.

(Not that I'm saying that's what you advocated. For all I know, you were just making a joke in your reply, and the lack of smiley confused me. You may feel, like I do, that sometimes it's appropriate to throw everything you've got at the PCs, and sometimes it's less so.)

gruntl said:

I disagree. As I said, the red side almost always looks much better, but often isn't any better, or is only marginally better. I've run some numbers to see if this would make my point more clearly about red vs green.

Let's look at Troll-Feller Strike. I chose it partly at random (it was in the first Player Character box I opened) and partly because the math on it was reasonably easy for me to figure out. It's not one of the absolute best cards, but it's pretty darned good. It's a solid tier-2 card, and the tier-1 above it is comprised of only about 3 cards, 2 of which have seen errata. I imagine you could easily argue that Troll-Feller Strike is in a 12-way tie for 4th best non-magic attack card. It certainly doesn't suck.

Looking at the card, one's initial instincts are that this card is much better on the red side than the green side. The red side has that juicy double-boon line and the very respectable comet line, both of which are absent from the green side. What's more, the green side adds an extra black die of difficulty to your roll. First impressions are that this card is much better on red than green. In theory, you could roll a hit for + 7 damage, +2 criticals, and a number of bonus wounds based on the severity of one those criticals. While that's not gonna happen very often, it's still clear that the red side does tons more damage than the green!

Except it doesn't. After running the math, I've concluded that on average it does 0.2 damage more per attack. Average damage for the red side is 12.8725 minus target's toughness. Average damage for the green side is 12.66 minus the target's toughness. You can plug different variables into it, but unless you're looking at very high-level characters, the basic dynamic does not alter.

For those interested in verifying or rebuking my claim, I'll now detail how I arrived at those figures. Those who have a dislike for math probably won't find much of interest in the rest of my post and should feel free to skip it.

I used the attack pool from the Original Post in this thread. 1 purple, 3 blue, 2 stance, 1 yellow. In my experience, most attack pools also have at least one white and at least one black die, but since they kinda come close to cancelling each other out (and the math is much simpler without them), I figured we'd leave the white and black out and just stick with his original dice.

I ran the numbers through the online probability tool at http://www.jaj22.org.uk/wfrp/diceprob.html, as that saved me a lot of time and effort, though it meant I don't have numbers for odds of rolling 4 or more successes, or similarly large numbers of boons and banes. I rounded those results to the nearest percentage point and made little results charts.

Given those numbers, the red side has the following Hit or Miss percentages:
10%: Miss
35%: Hit +1 damage
55%: Hit +3 damage

The red side has the following boon or bane odds:
1%: 2 Fatigue from Banes*
16%: 1 Fatigue from Banes*
21%: 0 boons or banes
25%: If it hits, gets +1 damage, ignore armour soak
19%: If it hits, gets +3 damage, +1 critical.
18%: If it hits, gets +4 damage, +1 critical, ignore armour soak

To determine the overall damage odds, I multiplied those two percentages. These are rough numbers, for several reasons. (The accurate math is actually more complicated because some results are less likely to occur concurrently. With the red dice, you get slightly more banes on rolls that have fewer successes, and some sides have more than one symbol so you get more extreme rolls. I played around with that for a little bit, and decided the numbers weren't different enough to justify the extra effort. This is part of why I rounded them to the nearest percentage point for the charts here, as the long flowing digits aren't any more accurate than the shorter numbers that are easier to read.)

This multiplication came up with the following percentages for the damage results of any given roll.
10%: Miss
13%: Damage N+1
21% Damage N+3
9%: Damage N+2 (+ignore soak)
7%: Damage N+4 (+1 crit)
6%: Damage N+5 (+1 crit, ignore soak)
14%: Damage N+4 (+ignore soak)
10%: Damage N+6 (+1 crit)
10%: Damage N+7 (+1 crit, ignore soak)

If we assume that N=10 (Strength 5 + Hand Weapon), and that the ability to ignore armour soak adds on average 2 points of damage to the total**, then this generates an average damage per attack roll of 12.86.

Of course, that doesn't take the comet line into account. The comet line turns one point of damage into a crit, and then adds bonus wounds equal to the severity of that crit. Crit severity will vary wildly depending on what cards have been handed out already as wounds, and which expansions you have. I did a number crunch on my deck and found the average is 2.25 damage. This assumes a fresh deck and no pre-existing “flesh wound” crits on the foe. (If they have a single pre-existing "fleshwound" crit, it rises to 2.34, in case anyone cares)

The next step was to calculate what percentage of hits can actually find the comet effect useful. Obviously, you don't want to use the comet line if you didn't net any other successes, or if it could be used as a boon to do +1 damage AND cancel a couple points of armour soak. So, this is only going to be an additional boost in the situations where your roll shows 2 or more potential successes, AND you also already have 1 or more banes or 3 or more eagles as your final boon/bane result from all the other dice but the yellow one, AND you roll a comet. You have a roughly 19% chance of rolling a comet (17% from your initial roll of a yellow die, plus 2% from rolls that get one or more Righteous Successes before rolling the comet), a 76% chance of scoring 2+ successes, and 35% (17% + 18%) chance of scoring banes or 3+ boons. So at best, the comet line is a smart move on 5% of all rolls (as .19 * .76 * .35 = .05054). So, on 5% of all rolls, we add .26 damage, meaning we add an average of 0.125 damage per attack roll.

The end result being that we do an average damage on the red side of 12.8725 minus the target's toughness.

Now let's look at the green side. Same process (except we can skip the obnoxious part about the comet, since there's no comet line on the green side).

Green Side:
Hit vs Miss Odds:
11%: Miss
40%: Hit +1 damage
49%: Hit +3 damage

Boon and Bane Odds:
0%*: 2 Fatigue
10%: 1 Fatigue
19%: 0 boons or banes
71%: If it hits, gets +1 damage, ignore armour soak

Overall damage odds:
11%: Miss
12%: Damage N+1
14% Damage N+3
28%: Damage N+2 (+ignore armour soak)
35%: Damage N+4 (+ignore armour soak)

Assuming the same value for N (10) and for armour soak (2) as we did for the red side, this results in an average damage of 12.66 minus the target's toughness.

The red side does 12.8725, just 0.2125 damage per hit more than the green. As I indicated, most of the above numbers were rough, and there could be rounding errors that I've missed. But the margin of error on my numbers is likely to be smaller than the margin of damage bonus that the red side of the card has. Whenever there was doubt (such as the comet effect), I chose for the numerical result that gives the larger boost to the red side, yet it still only got ahead of the green by 2 tenths of a point of damage.

The upshot of all this is that the two sides of the cards are deceiving. The red side often looks much better, when it's actually just minimally better or just breaking even. This all has to do with the extra banes on the red dice, which make you much less likely to score beneficial boon lines. For a card like Accurate Shot, where the green actually looks better than the red, I say with confidence that the red side is actually quite horrible and the gap between them is huge.

Notes:
*: In addition, there's a 36% chance of getting a fatigue from the red dice's exertion symbols, which happens almost independently of the boon-bane status of the rest of the roll. Overall, the roll has a 47% chance of generating 1 or more fatigue, with a maximum fatigue gain of 3 points per roll.

By contrast, the green die only has a 10% chance of getting fatigue at all, and a less-than two-tenths of a percent chance of getting 2 fatigue (and no chance at all of getting a third). Given that every roll of the green pool has a 48% chance of recovering a fatigue, they can pretty much ignore their fatigue status.

36% of green rolls will end up adding 2 extra recharge tokens to an action or dropping the parties best iniative token down by two. Just how bad that is compared to the red sides fatigue has a lot to do with the tactical situation and the character build, not to mention just how cruel the GM is feeling at the moment.

**: I chose to equate “ignore your target's armour soak value for this attack” with +2 damage as 2 is approximately the average soak of foes in the Tome of Adventure. One could argue that this is below average for the sorts of foes you'd use Troll-Feller Strike against. However, since the green dice has very reliable odds of getting the single-boon trigger to ignore the soak, if we assume soak is higher it just makes things worse for the red side. If armour soak is 3, then the red side does an average damage of 13.42 and the green side does 13.29, closing the gap by nearly half.

Conversely, the red side fairs a tiny bit better against low-armour foes. The red side would do 12.47 damage vs the green sides 12.03 if the armour soak were just 1 instead of 2. The higher the foes armour soak, the better the green side of the card does.The lower their armour, the better the red side does.

r_b_bergstrom said:

I just thought you were making a false dichotomy.

I believe that the norm for delays should be troubling to players. The concept behind the stance dice is "greater chance of success, with added risks." Without meaningful risk in a delay, then conservative dice become far and away better than reckless. Without consequences, the choice a player makes over which stance to go into and how deep becomes less meaningful. The feedback I most remember from my players about this game is that because of the stance tracker, each turn they felt like they had to make a choice, and that choice had consequences (good and bad).

Now, I wholeheartedly agree that there are times that the GM shouldn't "go for the throat" with these things. However, those are the exceptions rather than the rule.

That is the long way of saying, "after reading your post, I think we are in agreement."

Thanks for the analysis. I have some comments though.

- You left out the mean crit numbers per hit. Reckless use of Trollfeller strike will give you 0.33 from card effects (without comets), while the conservative side will give you 0 crits. Do you mean that crits are useless as a result, you seem to be only interested in pure wounds? If you feel that way I suggest treating all crits as they are treated for henchmen (adding wounds equal to rating). In any case, getting many crits is one of the strong points of Reckless stance, so it should be included if you try and compare stances.

- You say that only 5% of attacks will let you use the comet line to full effect. However, you miss adding anything for the 14% when this doesn't happen. These 14% will make the miss rate go down or boon effect chances go up, or just add another crit. Sure, this will have an effect also on the conservative side results.

- The variance is not at all the same for the two sides. In fact, the distribution functions for damage is not even symmetric around the mean. Their shapes are also different between the stances. The red side has a much larger variance (e.g., you can never get 17+ damage out from the green side, which happens 16% of the time in red stance). The mean output is just not a very meaningful measure for reckless stance (reckless is all about taking chances).

Finally, it should also be noted that Trollfeller strike by itself is one of the most dangerous cards to even own when using conservative stance. The GM can add delay recharge to it whenever you roll a delay symbol, making all you active defenses unusable. You shouldn't even consider buying that card unless you plan on never being in conservative stance.

I may be missing the point here - I didn't think that the "argument' was that the red side did more damage on average, but that it gave you the chance of doing more damage in a single hit...

At least that is how I explained it to my players, that they are opting to take the risks of being reckless to have a chance to land that big and telling blow....

The fact is, some action cards have a better red side, and some have a better green side, and some are pretty much the same regardless which side is used. Reckless stance is not always the best stance to use in melee, it depends on your cards. It also depends on your situation, since changing stances (barring the wardancer) is no easy task.
Saying definitively: "The red side is better on almost all offensive cards (and the offensive cards that are better at the greens side are invariably worse than the best red side cards, compare, e.g. Rapid Shot to Accurate shot)"
is a deceptive statement.
Lets take a look at some of the “more powerful” offensive melee attacks:
TrollFellerStrike
- *S* Same
- *SSS* Same
- {B} Same
- Red *BB* effect for +3 damage, +1 critical
- Red *C* effect for +1 critical, + damage of severity
- {B} Same
- {C} Same
Keep in mind that Red dice have chances to add banes, which decrease the likelihood of a *BB* line, it’s pretty much a wash. So, the only real advantage that the Reckless side has is the Comet effect. It’s an advantage, sure, but the Red side itself really isn’t much better than the Green. Sure, it has the potential for more damage, but the Green is more consistent.

Reckless Cleave:
- *S* Green side has +2 damage, Red side has +1
- *SSS* Red side for +3 damage, Green has only the *S* success line
- *BB* for Green adds weapon damage – great for 2-handed weapons or people with low-St but who are using at least a hand weapon (DR 5)
- *B* for Red adds Strength – Great if you have a 5 strength, otherwise the Green side is better. Keep in mind, Red dice increase the chance for Banes, so a single *B* for red is on par with *BB* for green
- Red has a *C* effect for +2 critical
- {B} and {C} same
So, again, the Comet effect is really about the only thing better on the Red side.

Accurate Shot is better Green. +4 damage on a Comet is better than performing a free maneuver (usually). As well as the Red side threatening to give you more stress, while the Green side has a chance to recover stress. Rapid fire is also better on the Green Side, since it takes two banes to cause a negative effect, while the red side only requires 1 bane, in addition to the red dice increasing the chances of getting banes.

In fact, for most of the ranged offensive action cards, the green side is *slightly* better than the Red.

Just like the fact that the Red side of the melee cards is *slightly* better than the Green. Balance, ya know. I'm just saying.

dvang said:

My statement might have been a bit too categorical (although, note the almost in there). Change "better" to marginally better, because I agree that in most cases the differences are quite small. I haven't gone through the cards in detail, it's just a feeling, so take it for what it's worth. The part in parenthesis is too strong though, there's probably a few really good green stance offensive cards that I forgot about (Sniper shot is really good for example).

However, I would say that both your examples are quite clearly better on the red side. As I said above, Trollfeller strike does a lot of crits when used in red stance (the comet effect adds extra wounds to the crit), it only does comet crits in green. You can't just ignore the effect of triple boons, there is a distinct chance of getting 3 boons (after cancellation) in both red and green stance (using the dice pool above, it's 18% in red and 20% in green, but note that some of these will be misses). In red stance 3 boons will result in +1 crit and 3 extra damage, in green stance it will result in 2 boons that can give you +1 crit if using a CR 2 weapon or fatigue regen. The banes on the red dice has an effect, but it is quite small on the 3 boon result due to how the dice combine (only 2% difference on the 3 boon result, about 15% on the one boon result). I think r_b_bergstroms calculations are correct, the red side is marginally better if you look at wounds only and only care about the mean damage. Again, note that Trollfeller strike is really dangerous to even own, you do not want the GM to be able to make all your active defenses unusable whenever you roll a delay (on any ability). I would say that even owning Trollfeller strike as a conservative fighter is more "reckless" than using it in reckless stance.

Reckless Cleave is to me clearly superior on the red side. A one boon result on the red side is 14% more likely than a 2-boon result on the green side (62% vs 48%, again using r_b_bergstrom's dice pool), so you cannot make the assumption that they are as likely. Also, the extra crit on a comet makes the action better on the red side by itself. Rapid fire, hmm, that's actually a close call after the errata, it depends a bit on whether there are any enemies within close range, if not, I'd say that the red side is superior. I still think Accurate shot is pretty weak compared to Rapid shot. though.

But I agree with your general points, my posts were mainly in response to the claim that the stance is completely useless. "Sure, it has the potential for more damage, but the Green is more consistent" is exactly what it is about. Green is safer, but in red you have the chance of really amazing stuff. Some people like that, some don't.

Dont forget that on reckless cleave you use boons to add dmg AND recharge tokens on that card.And as you said green side dont have SSS effect what is kinda easy to achieve with reckless dices.And imo delay symbol is much worse that 1 fatigue.So if you roll delay+boon effect its 6 recharge tokens what is kinda bad.For me personally red side for RC is much better thah green.But true,i agree on most of cards sides are similar.

gruntl said:

My disregarding of the effects of crits was based both on my own experiences with the game and with numerous threads on these forums about crits. A significant portion of the crit cards are meaningless for the NPCs, even if devastating to the PCs. Giving a black die on Fellowship to a Beastman is pretty irrelevant.

Yes, I could add a house rule like you propose, and if it was in effect, it would change the very math we're talking about. With that rule in play, the red dice would indeed be much more appealing.

gruntl said:

There's no need to add something else in for the other 14% because all the results of the yellow dice were actually already figured in to the base probability charts. Rather than adding something to the red results for those 14%, the more accurate representation would be to subtract one success or one boon from the 5% of results where the comet effect was invoked. Technically, if you were using that benefit and getting the extra 0.25 average damage from the severity, then you'd be missing out on some other benefit, such as getting to ignore armour soak.

gruntl said:

Absolutely the variance is different. However, in RPG combat, high variance almost always favors the underdogs. The little kobold that's on stage for one or two attacks and is woefully outgunned by the Heroes benefits much more from high variance than a PC does. Now, I will admit that the Warhammer setting has the PCs as the underdogs more often than any game I've played other than Call of Cthulhu. But I still bet that at the start of most fights, the expectation is that most of the PCs will survive. The benefits the PCs reap from one lucky roll are almost always less than what they suffer from 1 bad roll.

EDIT: I figured out your math. Ignore my question (which I've deleted) about the 16%.

My disregarding of the effects of crits was based both on my own experiences with the game and with numerous threads on these forums about crits. A significant portion of the crit cards are meaningless for the NPCs, even if devastating to the PCs. Giving a black die on Fellowship to a Beastman is pretty irrelevant.

Yes, I could add a house rule like you propose, and if it was in effect, it would change the very math we're talking about. With that rule in play, the red dice would indeed be much more appealing.

Well, crits may not be that good. But you have to agree that getting a crit is preferable to not getting one. Reckless stance gives more crits (at least with Trollfeller strike).

There's no need to add something else in for the other 14% because all the results of the yellow dice were actually already figured in to the base probability charts. Rather than adding something to the red results for those 14%, the more accurate representation would be to subtract one success or one boon from the 5% of results where the comet effect was invoked. Technically, if you were using that benefit and getting the extra 0.25 average damage from the severity, then you'd be missing out on some other benefit, such as getting to ignore armour soak.

Hmm, are you certain this is the case? The probability calculator does not output comets, and I'm very much doubting that it converts comets into successes or boons in the way you assume. But you may be correct, no way to know unless someone with knowledge on the actual code can give input. But it doesn't matter much for the comparison since both red and green will benefit from this effect.

Absolutely the variance is different. However, in RPG combat, high variance almost always favors the underdogs. The little kobold that's on stage for one or two attacks and is woefully outgunned by the Heroes benefits much more from high variance than a PC does. Now, I will admit that the Warhammer setting has the PCs as the underdogs more often than any game I've played other than Call of Cthulhu. But I still bet that at the start of most fights, the expectation is that most of the PCs will survive. The benefits the PCs reap from one lucky roll are almost always less than what they suffer from 1 bad roll.

Well, the little underdog opponents in WFRP are usually henchmen, reckless stance is king vs henchmen since crits will just make them die like ants. And for the really dangerous foes, reckless stance might actually be needed to kill them before he kills off the entire party. Also, wfrp is not a game which is perfectly balanced in terms of encounter challenge, it cannot be since careers aren't balanced. My character (a conservative soldier) goes into each battle expecting to die . Most people are anyway not interested in building a character that is best on average, you build a character based on a concept ("I want an raving axetoting trollslayer"). In my opinion characters that rely on reckless stance can work very well in combat (as good as characters in conservative) also mechanically.