One of the things I like about WFRP3's dice pool mechanic is that with one roll it gives information that in other games would require multiple rolls.

However, I am unsure how this work in practicality and am looking for some feedback.

An example:

There's a fight up the road. The question is, will the PCs walk right into it or hear at a distance and be able to prepare for it?

In many of my other games I would just have the PC roll perception (or eqvuivalent) starting very far away at hard level and then let them roll again and again as they get closer or until they are virtually in the middle of the fighting. This can be resolved with one roll using degrees of success/failure or some such but I do not find it an elegant solution.

Now, with WFRP3 it is easier to just let them make an Observation (Int) check and read the result. One success (hammer) could be that they notice the fight at medium range, two successes at long etc.

So far so good but which difficulty should I give them and how will it impact how I could/should interpret the roll?

Should I just go with average for these situations and be done with it, or is it better at hard or easy (or am I making to big a deal out of this)?

Thanks in advance,

/bladerunner_35

Personally, unless there's a good reason otherwise, I make all difficulties Average (2d). I think in this situation it works well to do what you suggest and have levels of success approximate range. Of course, once you get a certain distance from the action, no one could possibly fail to notice it.

Boon effects should be pretty straight-forward to add. Without any more urgent factors, I would probably go for something like [boon][boon] that character gets some extra info, like 'it sounds like it might be that gang of dockers you spoke to earlier, having trouble with the law,' or 'you definitely heard someone shout 'For Sigmar!' With a Comet bringing even more precise or important info, and the Banes and Stars contributing equivalent misinformation.

Alright, thanks for the input monkeylite.

It depends ... are the enemies ahead trying to be quiet? If so, it should be an opposed check against the enemy's Ag/Silent Move/Concealment.

If not ... I would vary the difficulty depending on the enemy regardless. Trying to hear a Troll ahead will be easier than trying to hear some giant spiders, etc. While the enemy might not be intentionally trying to hide/be quiet, some are going to naturally be more conspicuous than others. 2d is probably a reasonable 'default'.

Personally, I keep these averages in mind ...

These are not perfect, but if 3 chracteristic dies are average, then this percentages give you a nice starting point ...

I ask myself what are the chance an average person would accomplish this under typical circumstances and then modify it from there.

(I round them off to remember them easier)

Success Rates with 3 Characteristic Dies
-
Simple 0d = 87.5% (~90%)
Easy 1d = 59.5% (~60%)
Average 2d = 38% (~40%)
Hard 3d = 24% (~25%)
Daunting 4d = 14.5% (~15%)

I found 2d difficulty too hard (just look at GullyFoyle statistics) to use it as an average. I have to say that I kind of dislike failures on checks. I much prefer "partial successes".

Your example makes a perfect one. What happens if the party fails the check? They get into the fight without even noticing it? Obviously, I can't be (unless the fight is like the other side of a wall or hill, or something like that). So I'll make the check 1d (only if I want them to have a small chance of getting a Chaos Star, otherwise I'll go for a 0d check for this one). I determine beforehand how much successes are needed to spot the fight at a set distance. For example :

0 S : Detect the fight at close range
1 S : ... at medium range
2 S : ... at long range
3 S+: ... at extreme range

I also like dvang idea of adding more challenge dice depending on how easy it is to detect the fight. Like he said, a screaming Troll fighting some guards would make a lot of noise (0d or 1d). A thug strangling a travelling merchant would obviously be way more difficult to detect (like 4d).

Some other considerations (note, I only tested these on 100 rolls). If the GM is not doing a "neutral stance" test, then you've got pretty good success at 2 average difficulty.

2 Characterstic +1 Green (2 purple)
60% success

2 blue, 1 red, 2 purple

57% success

Thanks to the online dice roller: www.gmtools.excelocms.com/dice_roller.html#roll

jh

I assume this site is accurate:

http://www.jaj22.org.uk/wfrp/diceprob.html

It says the chance of 1 or more successes for:

2 blue, 1 green, 2 purple = 44% chance of success

2 blue, 1 red, 2 purple = 43% chance of success

The link is from:

http://www.gmtools.excelocms.com/useful_stuff.html

which has the tool Emirikol used ... I don't know where the discrepancy is ... anyone know?

That is pure success and does not consider success plus banes.

jh

for 1000 rolls the dice roller is off with about plus/minus 5%. A pretty good estimate, but not perfectly accurate. I like it more than the propability calculator though.

Emirikol said:

Sorry to side track the thread, but could you elaborate? Boons/banes don't help someone succeed (just modify how they fail or succeed) so how would having boons/banes change the success rate ...

Edit:

I just rolled 500x = 2 blue, 1 green, 2 purple and got a success percentage of 43.8% so it looks like both generators are very close.

Emirikol and I are just miss communicating I think

Still, I find 60% chances of success very low (unless the task seems very difficult). I much prefer something around 50% sucess, 25% partial success and 25% failure (that's the odds of a single blue die btw).

Also, I may have a divergent vision on difficulty of checks. I tend to prefer setting difficulty depending on the narration rather than the "physical" difficulty of the check. For example, if the characters are running after a carriage and try to hop in to fight the thieves who are trying to get away with it, physically, it may be difficult to outrun a speeding carriage but narratively, it's much more interesting if they hop in and fight the dudes while the tumbling carriage runs at full speed than being just plainly outrun and lose them. So, in this case, I'd make the test 1d since it's more interesting to succeed than fail. In fact, when failure is way less interesting, I give the players to score a "partial success" if they have no successes but at least 2 boons. A partial success could be that they do get to jump on the carriage, but they're like barely holding it while their legs are being dragged on the ground, or something like that.