You might not be, as I think I recall the text saying that "successes" rolled add to the damage, not "extra" successes; I'd merely referring to the times when it mentions extra successes, however.

There is an example in the book (out of the house a the moment, so no page number) that says if you rolled 4 successes, you'd deal +4 damage. So the book is pretty clear that it's total successes.

Shakespearian_Soldier said:

I found the text that confused me (page 107, Base Damage (DAM)):

"This is the minimum damage inflicted if the attack with this weapon hits. Each NET [success] generated during the attack check adds one point of damage to this base damage rating."

The biggest complaint my group has with the dice is the fact that advantages and disadvantages seem to come up more often than actual successes and failures. And it does get taxing to constantly have to translate what the results do when the character just missed. Now this might be because these were starting characters and once they start getting more dice than the difficulty dice it will be less of an issue.

Inksplat said:

Zar said:

Don't force the narrative interpretations. There is nothing wrong with regaining/suffering some strain or tossing out some Boost/Setback dice to keep things moving until the next time a situation occurs where a more narrative/exciting approach is warranted.

My experience is primarily coming from WFRP's narrative dice mechanics, but I don't always have a cool or pithy way of describing every exchange in a combat ( especially if I've pulled an encounter out of my hooha and didn't come up with raging rivers and debris strewn battle fields that can be used to hang up a PC or give them an advantageous reprieve ). And it is combat where the highest number of rolls occur, resulting in most of the " okay we've got…some more boon results but no damage.. .". The easiest way ( not necessarily best since this is just imo) I've found of keeping the action going is to just go " okay Rutiger here's a bonus setback die for the very next thing you plan to do " or " tick off a couple strain Luxo ." It's not an A+ narrative interpretation, but then you get to those moments where a more narrative free-form use of Advantage/Threat is warranted.

Another thing that can make using up Threat and Advantage more fun in combat ( again imo) is to let the players spend their Advantage and Triumphs ( arbitrated by the GM if things seem out of line or if the players simply have no interest in doing so ). Then let players spend Threat and Despair generated by their opponents ( again, arbitrated by the GM if things get out of hand or if the players decline ). Then when the tables are turned we do the opposite ( so I spend NPC Advantage and Triumph and assign Threat and Despair results generated by the PCs ). I've found that it helps introduce a bit of strategy into the application of the modifier symbols ( in WFRP it's Boon/Bane, Comets/Chaos Stars) .

But as Lavar Burton says, " You don't have to take my word for it. "

Zar said:

So what's the reality of this? Are there actually more Advantage and Threat symbols on the dice than Success and Failure symbols?

On ability Dice, there are an equal number of Advantages and Successes; on Difficulty dice, there are two more Threats then Failures; On Proficiency Dice there is one more success then Advantage (plus one Triumph); on Challenge dice there are equel numbers of Threats and Falures, plus one Dispair. Lastly, one Boon dice, there are two more Advantages then Successe;, and on black dice, equal failures to disadvantages.

Which means, over all, that they should be roughly equal.

14 faces with Success on them (Counting Triumph). 13 faces with Advantage. 12 faces with Failure (counting Despair). 13 faces with Threat.

5 Succeses share a face with an Advantage. 3 Failures share a face with Threat.

3 of the faces have double Successes. 4 of the faces have double Advantage. 3 of the faces have double Failures. 3 of the faces have double Threat.

Boost dice have more Advantage than Setback dice have Threat. (4v2). Both have 2 Success/Failure.

Ability and Difficulty dice are 5 Success and 4 Failure. 5 Advantage vs 6 Threat.

Proficiency have 10 Success and 8 Advantage. Challenge has 9 Failure and 8 Threat. (Counting both Triumph/Despair)

I'm glad to see other groups have noticed that the number of advantages getting produced and the frequency of failures that occur seems distracting to game play. This was a major gripe from my players at my table; They found it was difficult to visualize what was occurring based on the rolls, with so many advantages on failure rolls. They also found trying to figure out how to spend those advantages got in the way of enjoying the game (even after they knew how to spend them).

I understand that it's great that you can fail the roll and still get SOME positive outcome, but, anecdotally, it feels "overtuned", in that failed rolls tend to produce LOTS of advantages, and successful rolls tend to produce fewer advantages. This is a result of how the symbols are distributed on the dice, i.e. faces that produce advantages/threats are less likely to produce successes/failures, and vice versa. I can produce the math that supports this if people want to see it. In brief I can report that my simulated data shows a strong negative correlation ( r = -.6) between the net success produced and the net advantages produced. I've found that value to be consistent across a variety of dice pools.

-WJL

I have a quick question generated by some of the early posts in this thread. When an engaged character wishes to move away from an engagement, he has to perform a disengage maneuver, after which he becomes "unengaged"

Does the disengage maneuver ALSO move the character to close range from the disengagement, or does the character need to spend ANOTHER maneuver to reach close range?

-WJL

LethalDose said:

Sorry, this was in the wrong thread.

Having just finished our first session tonight I can say that the Dice Mechanics in this game are excellent. The first reason is that is keeps the game moving quickly. Assembling your dice pool is a simple process, by the end of the night everyone could do it in a split second, and once the roll was made you knew the result, no more checking against AC, no more looking for that extra bonus +1 somewhere, it is all in the dice.

To weigh in on the Advantage/disadvantage debate I am firmly in the camp of loving that they come up almost every roll, It allows me as a GM to fill the narrative with trips, slips, and falls; acrobatic leaps, stunning displays of weaponry and anything else you can imagine. As has been mentioned, dealing or healing a strain and moving on is completely legit as well. The real fun comes when 3 or 4 advantages or disadvantages get rolled and you can really spice up the action in amazing ways. It really gets the players into the narrative as well when they see a bunch of advantage come up and quickly jump in with "ok this is what my character does."

I think it really depends on the style of GM and for a run and gun, fly by the seat of my pants, fun first rules second GM like myself, I LOVE this system. I can see how some people that prefer the more rigid, structures play may not like it though and in that case they have the advantage disadvantage charts for a reason, you can always translate them into mechanical things like dice or critical injuries or strain if you don't like the narrative style as much.

I posted this in another thread, which concerns a related issue:

I've noticed using the app, and then putting the stickers onto dice and rolling them, that I produce a serious amount of both threats and advantages. I haven't done the math, but it seems I often get results with either one success (remaining after cancellation) and then either lots of threats or advantages.

I have been wondering in my tiny head, and as I said I have not done the math so I can't take these things into account, so this is just a wild notion. What about reducing the number of advantages, perhaps only by one, on the ability die and adding another success. Similarly one could reduce the number of advantages on the proficiency die and adding the same amount of successes. If this is mirrored on the difficulty and challenge dice (or not, the difficulty and challenge dice could remain untouched really) , this should according to my flawed logic make successes "slightly" more frequent than advantages (which seems to pop up all the time), while simultaneously at least adjust the bonus from upgrading the ability die to proficiency versus adding a boost die. The latter being statistically better than improving an ability die (see discussion here ).

I am only curious why so many advantages pop up all the time (of course I might just be "spending" the good results on the dice), I'm not sure I like it… to receive tons of advantages and not successes.

Alternately one could just up the number of successes on the proficiency die to adjust for the boost die. Leaving the ability die alone.

Of course, the logic at the base here is that adding a die to the dice pool, whatever sort, is better (ie creates greater change and variant results) than just increasing a die type in the pool with no addition. Increasing the number of sides rolled is not necessarily better than adding the number of dice (although adding a d6 to a d8 is similar to rolling 2d7 or a 1d14 if those existed - so adding a d6 to the dice pool creates a greater variation of results than replacing a d8 with a d12), although I'm not sure if this is desired from the devs point of view.

Lots of good discussion here. Our group is playing the included adventure and has played 2 five hour sessions. Comments were the amount of die rolling during narrative seemed perhaps too "clunky". That said, a friend who has played lots of Warhammer Fantasy said the die set is the same system, very similar. His comments were the more you play the faster it is to pick out what the die are saying, and of course everyone has their own set of dice speeding up results. On the flip side I think SW is probably faster paced than Warhammer. The last SW session we played was a lot of fun. We did zero combat yet everyone was involved in the story even though we split up into 3 groups during a good part of the game. I really like the way the die system induced narrative. For example, last session our sneaky PC's roll totaled 1 success to steal a doctors coat yet rolled 3 disadvantages. Our GM said the coat didn't have a name tag or any other ID, passes, etc., so they would have to use deceit. etc. to get past certain areas.

Instead of decreasing advantage / disadvantage faces as others suggest, perhaps increase the total number of faces. Maybe green and purple die are d10s or d12s and the extra faces are blank and/or successes. That way the possible combinations are still there, just decrease the rate advantages / disadvantages pop up. I'm not a math person so I'm guessing at this.

Fortunately, we have a strong GM who is very familiar with the SW universe. My experience is that the impromptu story telling each time we rolled (and we rolled a lot) was adding a good flavor. As stated by others, it might be good to see statistically the die rolls not always be lots of advantages / disadvantages only because when those rolls occur they are a little more special and not as routine. Again, only 2 sessions played so we are still acclimatising. Since our experienced GM comes up with stuff quickly its OK for us.

I just wanted to clear a point up for myself (and hopefully others).

If Failures cancel out Successes, and Advantages and Triumphs count as successes.

Do Threats negate Advantages, and Despair negate Triumphs? and can the Advantages/Triumphs, be used as successes, to negate Failures and Threats also?

Advantages don't count as successes, only Triumphs do. Advantages are entirely separate. However, if you read p11-12 of the book, it explains clearly what results cancel each other out.

MILLANDSON said:

As a suggestion for people that are concerned about have too many rolls not generating success but generating lots of advantages, perhaps test if having advantages also count as a success and threats also count as a failure, as this might increase the number of rolls that equal success with and advantage or failure with threat? I haven't tested this but I think it might work?

Without there being more blank sides, that'd mostly destroy the point in rolling the dice. If Advantages counted as successes, and threats as failures, you'd only really have to look at the number of positive and negative dice to tell if you would succeed or not.

As I've mentioned elsewhere I quite like the number of advantagesor threats generated by the dice. Many weapons have quite high crit values and would never crit in combat with even fewer advantages rolled.

In addition choosing how to spend rolled advantages is the most tactically significant decision a player gets to make in combat. I would not want to see that reduced.

MILLANDSON said:

Actually, forget what I said as I hadn't really thought it through. However, you could reverse the symbols for failures and threats, this would increase the chance of a net success but also increase the chance of a net threat?

Am I right in assuming that if, when building a dice pool, the attribute and the skill are the same rank, no dice are upgraded? To use the example in the book, say 41-VEX had an Intellect of 2 and a Computers of 2. That would just be two Ability dice, right?

DailyRich said:

No, you would have 2 Proficiency dice.

DailyRich said:

The higher of the two numbers is the number of ability dice. In this case, 2. You then upgrade a number of dice equal to the other number. In this case, also two.

So you have 2 yellow dice.

-EF

But if both numbers are 2, there is no higher number. Or maybe I'm just being too literal…