Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere but I couldn't see it.

I know a skill can be trained once per rank (i think). If a character was Rank 6, could he have trained say weapon skill 6 times?

Also for above example, would that mean he would add 6 expertise dice to his dice pool?

Many thanks. New to WHFRP and finding some of it confusing..

The skill training limit is three times and one more for skill mastery (the rules for the latter are in the Heroes supplement afaik).

you gain a maximum of 3 expertise die from it (yellow)

the 4th, as said, stands for Mastery which brings eg. auto-success to easy checks

I want to borrow this thread for a question on skills:

Maybe I have missed it but I can not see any differences in these cases:

1. Rolling a skill check for a basic skill for which you have no training and it is not a preliminary skill for your career.

2. Rolling a skill check for a basic skill for which you have no training but it is a preliminary skill for you career.

True? Seems strange because then you start up with only a few trained career skills and you are the same as the average joe on the rest of the skills that defines what you do for a living.

andersb25 said:

I am wondering if you are thinking in terms of wfrpg 2nd ed. In wfrpg 3rd ed there is not such diferentiation as the one you are asking about. In wfrpg 3rd ed all characters start with all basic actions as "taken".

I am thinking of 3rd edition (have never played 2nd). What I mean is, is there any difference in what dice to roll in for example this case:

1. A PC with Strenght 4 trying to attempt a non trained Atheletics skill, and Athletics is not one of his career skills.

1. A PC with Strenght 4 trying to attempt a non trained Atheletics skill, and Athletics IS of one his career skills.

If there are no difference I find that a bit strange.

there is no difference in those 2 checks. as your character starts out with all the basic skills "aquired". the restriction is that he will not be able to train athletics outside of his career unless he is willing to invest more XP

Ok thanks. So you start out with one careers skill trained and if you do not spend creation points on skills your career will only make you better then everybody else in one skill.

andersb25 said:

I don't think you start with any skills trained, unless it comes from your race or from special rules for your career (i.e. starting as an Apprentice Wizard).

You do, look in the character creation chapter, at the table Creation Point Investments. By spending 0 creation points you get 1 skill trained.

that's right.

and our group found out that it is actually pretty wise not to invest in skill trainings at the time of creation since you can not specialize those with the dedication bonus at the end of your career. even though the specs only give white dice they are one the view possibilities to really make your character stand out in the form of abilities only he might have

Good luck to a player trying to stay alive out the gate with no skill training.

Since WFRP3 characters are estimated to be quite a bit tougher than 2e characters, I had to evaluate this on the dice roller:

Success chances without training:

Scribe attempting to hit in combat in neutral stance (2 blue, 1 purple) = Success chance: 44% Three success: 0%

Scribe attempting to hit in combat in one stance (1 blue, 1 green, 1 purple) = Success chance: 51% Three success: 0%

Scribe attempting a 2d athletics check (2 blue, 2 purple) = Success chance: 25% Three success: 0%

Thief, attempting to hit in combat in neutral stance (3 blue, 1 purple) = Success chance: 59% Three success: 6%

Thief, attempting a 2d athletics check (3 blue, 2 purple) = Success chance: 38% Three success: 3%

Soldier, attempting to hit in combat in one stance) 3 blue, 1 green, 1 purple = Success chance: 77% Three success: 22%

Soldier, attempting to make a neutral atheltics 2d check) 4 blue, 2 purple = Success chance: 51% Three success: 9%

Trollslayer, attempting to hit in combat, in one reckless stance) 4 blue, 1 red, 1 purple = Success chance: 83% Three success: 36%

Those odds look about right to me for a newbie character.

Now, Consider this Strength 4 Thug WITH training:

Thug, attempting to hit in combat in 1 stance (3 strength, 1 red reckless, 1 yellow, 1 purple) = Success chance: 83% Three success: 39%

Thug attempting a 2d skill check in neutral stance (4 strength, 1 yellow, 2 purple) = Success chance: 64% Three success: 21%

Trollslayer attempting to hit in combat in 2 reckless (3 blue, 2 reckless, 1 yellow, 1 purple) = Success chance: 90% Three success: 55%

What changes is that untrained characters do not the the high "triple success" effects.

What's currently happening (according to the OP), is that his group feels like they start maxed out, and there's nowhere to go and nothing makes anyone unique. Essentially, everyone is succeeding in massive doses no matter what their specialty. Removing automatically starting with "yellows" in a bunch of skills, definitely changes the odds of the purple dice significantly.

A GM can certainly expect to use a lot fewer "necessary" purple dice, and there is likely to be a lot more "assist" maneuver going on.

jh

As determined in the prior post, a WFRP3 scribe, untrained, in neutral stance has a better chance of hitting than most WFRP2 /combat-oriented/ characters.

jh

Why are you not including any defense dice in your example? Defense, active def and misfortune from aggression. Even more misfortune from being outnumbered. This adds up, when my PCs start a fight it's not uncommon that they have 5+ black dice in the pool. Your examples just show that PCs have an easy time when the GM play nice. Don't play nice, it makes WFRP a bit dull.

Sure it was harder in 2e when looking at base chances, but I'm not sure it's true when looking at the whole picture.

Gruntl, I don't want to turn this into a discussion, but you know I am of lately a bit sensitive to it sorry

Notice that Emirikol has not included fortune dice neither. My experience is that fortune dice coming from talents, fortune in characteristics, especializations, assist manoeuvres… far compensate misfortunes. Sure NPC have a dice pool, defence and active defences, and with this you can in a first round gather a huge amount of misfortune dice, but not a second round (as per raw the dice pool is shared in between monsters). In out of combat situations it gets even whorse, but this we already discussed in another thread (by the way, thanks again for all the tips there).

gruntl said:

Excellent question. The reason is that most cases for the PC will involve equal white dice (either fortune points, specialization, or other bonuses). For the monsters, the number of attack dice goes UP due to ACE dice, so my example is actually a bit low. It could be stated that monsters are even tougher than my example. They could be weaker of course, if you'd like to continue another example. My experience in the past 3 years however has been that wfrp3 characters are dramatically tougher than WFRP2 or D&D characters (at least initially).

I ran the stats for this per your example:

1 purple, 3 blue, 1 green, 1 yellow, 5 black (no white dice at all): Success chance: 48% Three success: 12%

That's like a highly trained noob soldier in 2e with no penalties, but not as strong as a D&D character (Whose typical first level bonus is +3, or roughly 58%)

If you'd like to revisit the numbers, the dice statistic evaluators are on my gallery page: gallery.rptools.net/v/contrib/emirikol7/ and a simpler version: gallery.rptools.net/v/contrib/emirikol7/

I'll simply agree with the OP that starting characters a little weaker will have the effect that he desires and will not break the game because the chance to hit/get hit is already generally so high (unless there are 5 black dice EVERY round with no white dice).

Guntl, this is actually kind of a neat topic as I was considering making a new d8 that would act like 2 black dice (without chaos star) to reduce the piles of dice that I too throw at my players (now we just need to make some stickers).

jh

Yepesnopes said:

Hehe, I'm probably a bit too grumpy about this as well. I never really understood the "3e is too easy" complaints, but experiences may vary of course. And when I see arguments that could be interpreted this way, I can't stay away . I don't actually think that was the issue Emrikolol wanted to highlight, but for a newcomer to 3e it could easily be read that way.

Of course, fortune is not included either in the example, but in my experience there is just no way that the players can get 4+ fortune on checks in their first rank (unless they really blow all resources). And you're also correct in that this only really works in the beginning of a fight. But I tend to use non-nemesis combat encounters more as resource sinks. Combat for the PCs is generally easy if they are fully rested and so on, but not so when they have already used up most of their resources. That's when the misfortune dice really starts to matter.

In other words, if the PCs are going to fail miserably I'd rather have them do it in the end of a scenario versus the big bad than in the beginning vs mooks.

Emirikol said:

Well, I agree that it won't break the game, but the GM will have to adapt encounters to it. Imagine running Gathering storm with that houserule? Grim and perilous eh

The idea with burning the ACE early and in defense is to make sure that some of the NPCs actually live to hit back. When they do they will have a quite good chance at hitting the PC and causing damage of some kind (wounds/fatigue/stress), which leads to resources going down for the PCs (see above). This approach seems to work for my group in any case, YMMV.

New d8 sounds neat, wonder if you can make the chances the same though.

Yea, now that the dice are officially out of print, I'm looking at other options for dice. I suppose I could go so far as to buy some blank dice and mark them up, stamp them, or even put stickers on them

I'm not so hot on the stickers idea though. I wonder how hard it would be to stencil + airbrush them? The eagles probably not so bad, but the skulls might come out a little lame.

Honestly, we just need about one more set of dice. i bought 4 packs and one of my generous players purchased a pack as well. That plus the core still isn't enough for 4 players + GM.

The point of my posts was to show that it 'can be done' and what the odds would be for a character.

Personally, I'm getting to the point where I want LESS house rules though, so I'm going to just enforce the "if you take training at creation, then you will not get the free specialization when you complete a career. That should be enough to go on.

Methinks perhaps though if there was something else to spend x.p. on, there would be less power creep. Perhaps attunement of specific items for other careers (Pedlar's Cart, Boatman's Boat, BountyHUnter's Net, Soldiers Banner, Witch Hunters …uh…Torch?)

jh

Next campaign I am going to start with characters made from 20 CPs (15 CPs for non-humans) and cost of training 1, 2 and 3 XPs. I would let you know how it develops. Neertheless, having in mind my large party of players, it probably won't be representative.

Really? I have 4 players + GM. The Core Set dice, GM Vault dice, + 1x dice pack is enough for all of us to use. The dice split well evenly into two piles, with only the occasional borrowing of dice from the other pile. As the GM, I just grab from whichever dice happens to be close enough when making my rolls.

There is always the option of buying the dice App, of course.