Do you reroll all of the dice after completing the ancient ones combat task?

You know, when I first read your question I thought the answer was obvious, but after checking the rules I realise what a good question it is! The answer isn't particularly clear.

The sentence that causes the problem, I think, is this one: "Investigators may complete the task any number of times during the Attack the Ancient One step (but only once for each time they roll the dice)" (p12)

Really? Any number of times? Surely not!

The first clue is that it says players roll dice as they did for Resolve an Adventure Card. In which case each time you complete a task those dice become locked.

For the second clue, take a look at Yig. His task is two Peril (skull) icons. Now Yig is the usually the easiest AO to defeat but if you could roll all six dice EACH TIME, he would be a walk over. However, if you have to lock dice each time you complete the task, then even the luckiest player on the luckiest day of his life using an electrified luck machine, with both yellow and red dice included could only complete the task four times. And that seems the likely intention.

I didn't intend for this reply to be so wordy.

If anyone knows differently please post!

K xx

I'm not sure that is right. Afterall, the rules really do say any number of times, as you say.

Note that if you fail to complete the task, you do remove a die from your pool, but it does seem to suggest that each time you roll, you roll all dice in your pool and dice aren't locked when they complete the ancient one's task.

So you wouldn't always be rolling 6 green dice each time and a peril only appears on a single side of a green dice so even with initally rolling all 6 green dice, completing Yig's task isn't guaranteed.

I agree though that it isn't clear, I'm just not sure Yig is such the walk through you suggest he would be, because of the fact you lose a die each time you fail the task, so this doesn't neccessarily suggest you do lock dice when completing an AO's task.

Having said all of that - part of completing a task section in the rule book includes locking down the dice, so perhaps you do!

I wonder if anyone who went to Gen Con and saw the game demonstrations can confirm either way?

Indeed. It is not clear if you lock dice until you fail or if you refresh the dice pool after being successful. I'm leaning towards the idea they refresh. But that means it would be possible to solo an Ancient One with good luck.

Lock till they fail.

Basically, it's a special Adventure card, where there are N tasks, where N = number of doom tokens, and instead of resolving the whole adventure, you remove M tokens where M is the number of successes. You have to lock the number of dice, or lose them, so there isn't a chance to solo in ONE turn. The point is, you have to let the monster hit you. Alternatively, they could also say "You can only remove up to 4 tokens at best, for each player turn."

Personally I believe a players turn plays out like this when fighting the AO.

In this example Jon is fighting YIG with the standard 6 Green dice.

Jon rolls 6 dice – Fails and he sets aside 1 die.
Jon rolls 5 dice – Gets 2 peril (he LOCKS these).
Jon rolls 3 dice – Gets 2 Peril (he LOCKS these).
Jon stops as it is now impossible for him to score a hit with one dice as he requires 2 peril. He moves the clock forward and passes the dice to the next player.

This seems more logical as it means at best he could get 3 hits in, if each time he rolled 2 peril, before the clock moves and the dice are passed. If he could reroll successful dice it would mean it was possible for him to solo Yig in one round (if the dice were with him) although, were Ancient Ones are involved, the dice are rarely with the player

As other posters have mentioned, locking the dice is how we decided we'd battle the Ancient One.

Just got Elder Sign, and this was one of the rules questions I had too. It does seem logical to treat the AO exactly as you did the Adventure Cards, but the statement in the book seems kind of awkward then. I do think the locking of successful dice was their intent, as the book does say "as they did during the Resolve an Adventure Card" step, which suggests that all rules from that step apply to this one...but it would have been much better to spell it out (along with a fair number of other things).

I've sent FF a pretty big list of questions re: Elder Sign that I couldn't find definitive answers to in the forums, so if I get any official answers I'll let folks know. (Hopefully we'll get a FAQ soon--I do recall that the one for Mansions of Madness actually came pretty quickly...but then there's the long, long, long-awaited FAQ update for Arkham Horror that still hasn't been released. O_O)