I was thinking about stances and non-combat actions, and reflecting that some activities seem to better suit one or other stance. For example, many knowledge-based tasks better suit the concept of someone taking their time to come up with solution, and, similarly, a lock ought to be easier to pick if you take a bit of care and attention rather than throw caution to the wind.

With this in mind, is it fair for a GM to apply a variable difficulty based on the character's stance? I'm thinking it is, not only because it makes sense (imho of course) but also because there is precedent with some Action Cards having different difficulty modifiers on one side or the other.

But my question is, what do others think? Am I trying to micromanage, when in fact we should let the dice talk and then come up with an explanation as to how - on this occasion - being reckless was better than simply being neutral? And if you do allow a penalty for Reckless, does that also apply to PCs in a Neutral stance but who tend towards Reckless; i.e. reckless score is greater than conservative score. (FWIW, my answer is Depends, but usually No)

phild said:

I would probobly not take that direction for the simply fact that the dice are already being adjusted by the stance. Another words, its already inherantly easier or harder depending on your stance and the stance itself has its own risk.

I personally will often ask a player prior to making a skill check about his approach. Another words, if a player is making a lock pick check for example as he's breaking into a tavern at night, my question is "what is your approach? How are you doing it?" and based on his answer I will adjust his stance for him prior to the roll using his own narrative.

So if he says "Im going to try to do this quickly and quietly", I might make this more aggressive, if he says " Im going to do this so that there is no evidence left behind that the lock has been picked.. I might go more conservative.

Sometimes I will do the exact oppossite however. If for example I player says Im going to pick a lock and I see that he is grabbing aggressive stance die, I might say "ok are you doing this in a hurry, are you rushing? Because if your going to use aggressive dice Im assuming you are".. at which point they may agree or adjust their stance.

In as a whole however I find that because of the polar nature of Aggressive, Neutral and Conservative, an appropriate stance for any situation can always be derived and a narrative can be derived from a stance as compared to an action… aka picking a lock… agressive means quick, hurried… a little careless perhaps.. while conservative suggest taking your time, being careful.

In as a whole I just use the stance in the same way I use every mechanic in the game, I derive the narrative from what it suggests about what the character is doing/thinking.

BigKahuna said:

Bearing in mind that Stance dice have a greater chance of success than Characteristic dice, you're saying that someone trying to pick a lock quickly and aggressively is better than someone who just does it at normal pace? Similarly, someone who blurts out the first answer that comes to mind has a greater chance of success than someone who takes a few seconds to think about it, but runs the risk of getting fatigued by thinking too quickly?!

I fear the Stance dice may break down a little in these sorts of situations (although on the latter point, I'm comfortable house-ruling a Stress point instead of Fatigue point for some mental and social actions)

I would add additional stakes, like so:

If you roll reckless dice and get stress, you try a little too hard and your lockpick breaks.

If you roll conservative dice and get a delay, the guard patrol comes by again just before you get the lock open (if you fail) or just as you get through the door (if you succeed).

phild said:

Well your mixing mechanics here. These are two seperate things.

Your stance is yoru approach. This is your demeanor towards a situation. What that situation is irrelevant. All that matters is that the player selects the stance and this may in turn say something about the narrative.

Difficulty of a task, thats a completetly seperate thing and again stance is irrelevant. All that matters is that you set a base difficulty "How hard is this lock to pick " which is your challenge die. And than add modifiers "what things are effecting this roll positively or negatively". If you feel that rushing to open the lock results in a hgiher chance of failure (wether your stance is aggressive, neurtal or conservative) is irrelevant, if you think it would make it harder, add a fortune die.

Keep in mind that there is different narrative possible here. Perhaps by doing an aggressive stance the player is not in a hurry, but rather more paranoid (aka looking aruond constantly, trying to work the lock without look at it so he can keep his eyes ont he road". It doesn't nescessarly have to be described as "faster, harder, meaner etc.." Aggressive simply is a posture. You can sit quitely in a chair and be in an aggressive stance simply by saying, Im alert, Im listerning, watching, smelling for anything out of the ordinary…

Does that make sense.

I concur that adjusting difficulty for stance is not a good idea. People should never be punished for stance unless it's their own choice to use a suboptimal stance/side of action card choice. Stance is roleplaying and favoured reward/risk style. My one gripe about Gathering Storm was it picked on the Conservative stance with its Storm Cards.

The most you do is change or add special outcomes from stance-specific die results and interpret Chaos Stars differently. Reckless Chaos Star breaks lockpick, Conservative Chaos star means take so long a new problem emerges etc.

For example, Reckless lock-picking is quickly gauging "looks like this type, go right away for the approach that works with it" instinctual whereas Conservative is 'figure out style of lock and carefully approach it". Each stance can reflect different emotional, method, intellectual approaches - Reckless doesn't have to mean "Reckless" per se, it can mean impassioned, instinctive, spontaneously etc.

Rob

Bah, my replies keep failing to appear! I don't think the forum likes multiple QUOTES!

Thanks for the replies. I think it's an interesting debate. I still disagree, on two levels.

1) The rules. I found six tasks in no time at all which all vary difficulty based on stance: Extreme Shot, ***** in the armour, Troll Feller Strike, Beat back, Cut & Run and Fake out. So the rules as they currently exist think that stance can and should, with certain actions, influence the difficulty.

2) Common sense. I don't want to be patronising, but I'll state again what stance dice do - they increase your chance of success; they make you better at something. Will someone who is paranoid, looking around constantly, trying to work the lock without looking at it would have a BETTER chance of opening the lock than the exact same person taking a "normal" amount of time about it?

In addition, regarding valvorik's point that stance is roleplaying - it is, but it's also tactical. It's as much a game mechanic as chosing which action card to play, slotting a talent or playing a fortune point. As such, it's perfectly justifiable that it has a game mechanical difference.

Maybe it will help if I illustrate my thinking by example. Shall we stick with lockpicking?

You want to get through this door as quick as you can. Speed is represented by successes and boons. A reckless stance maximises your chance of getting through quickly, you dive straight in and don't think too much about it. But this recklessness does make the task trickier, so you get an extra challenge die (or maybe just a misfortune die if the lock is a simple one to begin with). A neutral stance may well take a bit longer (fewer successes) but you're less likely to mess up. A conservative stance may still get you through quickly by focusing all your concentration on the task at hand - but that may mean you lose track of time and end up taking longer than you hoped for.

All I take away from this is you're playing the rules, not the game.

I think this may stem from a misunderstanding about what Reckless and Conservative mean.

Reckless isn't about speed. It also isn't about being paranoid. There is nothing in the rules that make you go faster or more aware if you take a reckless stance.

Reckless is about taking chances.

So, for your lockpicking example, the character is taking more chances maybe by putting a little extra tension on the picks to power his way through. A more cautious thief may say, "I can't open this without ruining my tools," but the reckless thief tries anyways. Sometimes it pays off (more successes), sometimes it doesn't (there are banes on a die that should only have good symbols), and often he stresses himself out (exertion).

The dice already have those drawbacks built in.

Yeah, Phild, I think you are discounting the inherent disadvantages built into the stance dice in general, such as the potential stress/fatiuge generation from reckless or the delays from conservative.

As a side note, outside of combat aren't you supposed to generally supposed to limit stance dice to only 1-2 dice anyways?

Matchstickman said:

Now that's just rude. I'm certainly not playing your game, and I'm sorry if my interpretation of the game doesn't match your perfect understanding.

I'm not really trying to persuade anyone here, I can see there are well-formed views out there and the joy of WFRP is it has that inherent flexibility to be run different ways. I particularly love the example of putting more tension into a lockpick as an alternative view of reckless stance, which simply reflects the importance of asking the player to clarify how they interpret their stance in any given situation, so that you can evaluate the situation not just the game mechanics. Presumably in such a case, the lockpicks would break on a Bane or two (i.e. the consequence of using reckless dice is increased Bane chance) rather than just on a Chaos star? Or could one apply the Fatigue result to the lockpicks, allowing the player to succeed but break the picks in the process? Would that be a reasonable stretch of the fatigue result?

I am curious though, what do people make of those existing actions where the difficulty is affected by stance? These feel a little bit like "the elephant in the room"…

phild said:

I see your point but its worth noting that Action Cards are a more direct interpretation of mechanics with dice pool results more directly translated and as such more defined to the player, where as lock picking is more of a narrative result type . by the mechanics you either succeed or fail to lock pick, everything else is a gm fiat of dice interpretation.

So if you where to create an action card that says "Lock Picking Expert" for example and create a conservative and reckless side, ok than I can agree that as you specify the "results" mechanically and the players can count on it when they use the action card, increasing the difficulty based on stance makes a bit more sense and its a static aspect of the card.

I think the key seperation here is that not everything in the game happens in the mechanical and its important that if its "not in the mechanical" that you don't devise rules for it but rather play it like you would any other narrative situation, based on player description, situation… effectively case by case, in the narrative. What your effectively doing is devising a system for "stance" based difficulties, which appears to be designed to basically ensure the player makes the wise decesion and chooses the correct stance for the situation. In which case one of two bad things will happen.

1. The player will be penalized for unwitingly choosing the stance the GM wants to discourage by making more difficult.

2. Or if the player knows the rule, will simply always choose the most appropriate stance based on the GM's decesion on which stance would be harder or easier to succeed in.

In either case, your effectively railroading the players to basically roll in the stance you think is most appropriate in which case you should skip the whole thing and just put them in the stance you think is appropriate for the scene.

Its reasonable to say that rushing to pick a lock in one instance might result in breaking the lock when you fail with a chaos star and in another similiar situation it instead makes noise and alerts someone nearby. Its a scene, you set it up and you design that scene with imagry and a narrative result based on dice pool results, but there in the narrative there is no requirement for consistancy from the GM. While in the case of an action card there is. The players expect that if a Sigmar commet comes up they will get the benefit based on what that action card is and not have the GM interfere and say "no, thats not what happens this time, this time this happens instead". Its all part of the unspoken GM and Player contract in which the GM is allowed to fiddle with the narrative, but when their is a cold hard rule and expected result like that of an action card, that the GM abide by the rules.

Stance has no such rules, certainly if you define them you have to make them consistance. But trying to create a situation where "sometimes" the GM will punish or reward you for picking the right stance kind of breaks that social contract. Its fine not to have defined rules and let things exist in the narrative, but if you make a rule, it needs to be written down, defined and consistant. Else its unfair.

Hence my suggestion is to eliminate the link between "stance" and "difficulty" and simply add your difficulty based on the players description and if you feel a players "stance" and his "description" don't line up, adjust it. I think its more acceptable to a player when a GM says "Ok if your going to take your time and calmly pick this lock as carefully as possible" than you can't be 2 deep in the aggerssion stance and ask him to change it, rather than saying, ok but because of your stance this is more difficult here are your 2 misfortune dice. Because than the player will naturally try to back peddle if he knows that he can control the difficulty by simply adjusting his stance, and if you don't let him, you have basically created a new rule on the fly that the players don't know. And if they do know the rule your going to start getting the sitaution to sitatuion question… "What stance should I be in to make this easier?".

I think your going to have a lot of issues with this in particular once the players catch on to the fact that their stance directly corilates to how difficult or easy something is, because than its either a guessing game or they know and always pick the stance that makes it easiest. In which case the whole thing gets meta gamed.

WFRP is effectively designed to avoid exactly these kind of situations.

Some of my thoughts on the subject:

If the reckless stance make it harder when lock picking (or pick pocketing as well I guess?) then it feels odd that thieves have R3 C1. From a pure mechanical standpoint, those that are "supposed to" be lock picking stuff will be penalized for their default stance (or they cannot use their primary stance when doing fullfilling their primary role). I actually believe that pick pocketing or lock picking is inherently reckless, as I see it you're taking a big risk (getting caught, thrown in jail, fined or similar punishments) for the potential rewards lurking behind that door. This is the pure essence of reckless behavior in my opinion and the dice reflect it with the potential great rewards like rolling the double hammer result and the risks of rolling banes or exertion symbols.

Recklessly working on a mental problem, such as solving a really hard equation might symbolize that you stay up late, forget to eat/drink all potentially affecting you negatively but it can also yield results faster. It might also result in a headache or in a failed attempt at the problem, as you overwork yourself (i.e. rolling exertion/banes). This behavior can be seen in many students around the globe. Recklessly studying for exams all night, drinking a lot of coffee and getting a headache as a reward.

I can probably come up with more examples, but I won't ramble on any further.

I agree with the others.

The "difficulty" of the task is not due to the PC's stance.

A simple deadbolt lock has a difficulty to disable (perhaps 1d).

A complex multi-tumbler lock has a different difficulty to disable (perhaps 3d).

The lock itself (represented by the difficulty dice) doesn't change based on the stance of the thief that is trying to disable it. What is changing is the thief's ability to currently succeed at the attempt … which is represented by the stance dice.

Challenge dice are supposed to be relatively agnostic of most external effects. That is why things like the environment, weather, etc, are represented by misfortune dice and not additional challenge dice.

If I want to try to make a half-court basketball shot. The task itself is very difficult. The action of putting the ball through the hoop isn't inherently more difficult whether I aim and give a reasonable heave, or if I take my time to test the wind … put some talc on my hands to dry my sweat, calculate the arc of the ball to find the right angle to toss it. My chance to succeed at the shot might change, but the task is still the task: Put the basketball through the hoop from mid-court.

dvang said:

Thats exactly right and thats exactly how the system is designed to work. External factors that can make the task more or less challenging like rain, time pressures, someone trying to stick a sword in your ass while your doing it etc… are represented by fortune and misfortune dice. What the OP is saying is that "statistically speaking" the reckless and conservative dice have a higher chance of success than the attribute dice hence your stance effects your "statistical chance" of succeeding. I think the point to make here is that both the conservative dice and the reckless dice have potential drawbacks. The conservative dice for example at best can offer 1 success with the drawback of possibly having a "delay" on the action, while the reckless dice have the potential to have two success on one die but have the draw back of possibly rolling a fatigue symbol or a bane. This is how these dice are balanced out and those two symbols (fatigue and delay) are the contributing factors to the risks involved to the player (aka its the players choice).

I think however we are getting to deep into the math here and its an over analysis. You have to keep in mind that the dice system is abstract and the translation of the dice is for the most part a GM fiat when it comes to actions not represented by an action cards like most skill checks are including things like picking a lock for example. The point I'm making is that since its a GM fiat and the players don't know how the GM will ultimatly translate the dice and the fact that he is likely to be inconsistant in his translation since GM fiats are generally a case by case thing, it would hurt the abstract effect to create hard and fast rules for things like stance because the stance is where players are taking the reigns of control in this endevour. Another words, players can control things like their stance, how many fortune dice they can produce by creating favorable circumstances and often how many misfortune dice they have through accepting unfavorable circumstances. If you create a system where the stance sets the difficulty, players are going to effectively "make the best decesion" and since the GM is deciding "hey I think your stance should make this more difficult" the natural railroading effect here is that players will adjust the stance to what the GM decides is the best thing for their roll.

This is a case of trying to infuse realism into an abstract system and while I understand the allure of that, this sort of thing only works when the dice system is designed to mechanically function as a hard line. A good example of a system like that is GURPS where each skill, each action, no matter what you decide to do has a hard rule that can be referenced and through rule mastery the players can take actions that are the most favorable to them, but since this system doesn't have hard fast rules because its a abstract system, you have to accept that things should remain in the abstraction.

Its just a philosophical difference on how to play role-playing games, if you have chosen an abstract system trying to convert it into a hard/fast rule system is going to not only create a lot of headaches but your going to end up spending a lot of time creating rules. Exactly what an abstract system is designed to avoid.

So Im not saying the rule is bad or anything and I understand where the OP is going with it and why he is thinking in those terms, but it is effectively the oppossite of what the system is trying to "undo" about how role-playing game actions are resolved. Each GM has to make his own decesions about how much of the abstraction they want to translate to rules, but I have found that when you just accept the rules intent, not only is it easier to run the game, but you maintain its spirit rather than attempting to sort of piss against the wind if you get my meaning. But suffice to say, I understand where the OP is coming from, its tough in particular on older GM's who have played other system in which simulationism has more presence.

BigKahuna said:

The game runs pretty dang smoothly if you give the mechanics the benefit of the doubt for a few solid sessions and then start to kick out the stuff you don't seem to use and modify rules that seem to get in the way most often. The end result might be that the OP mods their challenge levels based upon stance. I think the overall advice in here is more along the lines of "just give it a chance brotha."

I think this has been a really interesting discussion, albeit one that I'm surprised has had such unanimity of opinion. To summarise, it seems that there's a strong consensus that:

1) Stance never affects the difficulty of using a skill
2) Stance shouldn't affect the difficulty of a task
3) Stance might affect a specific action, but only if there are clear narrative reasons - e.g. a player describes doing an action in a way that doesn't really fit their current stance (this is what is reflected by the action cards that have variable difficulties based on stance). Even here, it should ideally be Misfortune dice to reflect that the circumstances are more challenging, rather than the task being more difficult.

That makes a lot of sense to me - and if this may be surprising for any who thought I was firmly on the side of "stance affects difficulty", but I'm a firm believer in the power of adverserial argument to get to the kernel of truth!

Something else I'm interested in which is slightly off topic is the application of Stance dice penalties. How flexible are GMs with using these? Would you ever, for example, interpret a banes as being equivalent to a Delay or Fatigue result if none came up on the Stance die, treat a Fatigue as a Stress or treat a Delay as a Bane if the literal interpretation didn't feel right for the situation?

This difficulty in determining the esoterica of various results might also be one reason why they recommended not using stance dice when not in encounter mode. There, you have well-defined effects for fatigue and delay.

In the players guide one my find the following text

"Stance in Story Mode: By default, characters tend to act in the neutral stance and do not
convert stance dice. In story mode, most characters will act in neutral
stance most of the time. Strictly speaking, they will not make
use of their stance meter, but that is not to say that they cannot
make use of stance dice or the variable effects of different stances
on their action cards.
At the GM’s discretion, any action can be attempted in any stance,
provided a sufficient story-based justification is offered and the
risks inherent in adopting a stance are accepted. In most cases, only
a single die would be converted to a stance die in story mode, but
for exceptional circumstances GMs may allow additional dice."

So in my oppinion, differently from encounter mode, in story mode stances aren't meant to play a big role.