I've been playing around with the dice roller app a fair bit to try and get used to the system before I run my group through it, and discovered that more often than not I've ended up either failing with advantages, or not succeeding with advantages (Is there a difference between the two?) an was thinking I may end up house-ruling it so that you can trade in 2 advantages for a single success.

I'm not too sure how much that will affect the overall game.

THE /ince

I haven't done the math or counted the faces, but I can see that working if you allow Threats to be traded for failure as well. Mind you, that defeats the purpose of the dice mechanic in the first place, and could encourage players/GMs to trade away their advantages and threats every time.

Vinush said:

Advantage and success serve two different purposes in the game. Turning advantages into "almost successes" like you prepose would defeat the purpose of having them different, ad beeblebrox said.

It would turn most rolls into a static "pass/fail" dynamic, which is what the dice as they currently are try to avoid.

-EF

Vinush said:

See my posts above. Quite frankly, the math in this system has moved away from the 40+ year old paradigm of "success is all that matters.". Instead the dice math is geared towards ensuring even a "failed" roll provides the player some to contribute to scene via Advantages, rather than the standard "failure = wasted turn."

I take that on board, but I don't see how the players can ever hope to get anything done when out of 15 rolls I've just made on the app I've not gotten a single roll where I have succeeded.

Vinush said:

That is quite odd, in my experience. What dice pool were you rolling? In the game that I played in, successes were happening left and right. I think I was the only one to not get net successes on my roll, but it's ok…2 advantage and 1 triumph let me duck behind cover (2A free maneuver) and notice an explosive pipe right next to the leader of the bad guys (triumph).

-EF

@Vinush:

You're correct in that failed rolls tend to produce more advantages than successful rolls. This is caused by a strong negative correlation (r ~ -0.6) between successes and advantages on 'good' dice and failure and threats on 'bad' dice, which carries forward into roll results. There are other factors to be certain, but I want to be clear that there is a systematic and numerical reason that explains the results you've seen.

Anyone can say you don't 'feel' its a problem, but don't say this is wrong unless you actually show some figures to back this up. I've generated and presented my results earlier in this thread [i believe. I can re-post if players are interested].

As far as game-play consequences, I'm not sure what is going to happen. My biggest concern are "boost spirals", where players roll large amounts of advantages on failed rolls, use the advantage to provide boost dice to themselves on later turns or other players, who in turn do the same when they get failed rolls with large numbers of advantages. This cycle propagates until a player finally gets a successful roll, with huge results, and breaks the cycle. And if this 'breaking' roll is an auto-fire hit, under the current rule set someone's day is getting ruined really f***ing fast.

And yes, I've seen this happen.

Anyway, I've also seen what Vinush has seen, but I think the proposed mitigation is by DM & EF is appropriate: We need to break away from the binary fail-pass outcomes that have dominated RPG results in the past. But we have to acknowledge that it also leads to difficulty in repeatedly interpreting failed rolls that produce large volumes of advantages. Though I think that issue is resolved by leaving to the player to generate the narrative that describes their roll results.

-WJL

Vinush said:

I agree completely . My group has been having nothing but trouble with this from the start . I am sorry but I am tired of hearing about paradigm shifts and how this system takes some getting used to. When we aim to do something in a game, we want to know whether it happens or it doesn't, and it terms of resolution it needs to be definite in the majority of situations or contests . The extra help or complications from the situation are fine, but this is rediculous! "I failed but somehow I ended up with 5 advantages," and vice-versa, just aggravate all our gaming senses. Things have got to be more solid.

Well, you actually do know if you succeeded or failed (did you get more Successes than Failures). The Advantages can be spent in the narrative like "I failed to hit the target, but my shot managed to damage the barricade they were hiding behind" resulting in Boost being given to another player or the reduction of Setback, etc…

I'm just wondering (and honestly not being a d**k): for the guys defending the mechanics as-is, how many legit sessions have you played? I've probably been through about 7 or 8 with at least 3 PCs, and really, it gets old. I don't think anyone is saying that the 4 dimensions (success, failure, advantage, threat) isn't a great idea, but the implementation needs to be tweaked,

When your players end up failing with MASSIVE advantage, it just gets tedious to process. Or repetitive. Or nonsensical. Same goes for the opposite. How many times can your gun jam, run out of ammo, slip from the heroes hand, etc. it happens, like almost EVERY ROUND to at least one player or npc.

I honesty love the idea of being able to fail with advantage and succeed with threat - it just has to happen a lot less frequently.

… And the same goes for failing with triump, or succeeding with despair. Which is why those symbols should account for more successes and failures respectively.

At this point, I've played about a dozen legitimate sessions and a few "grind sessions" to stress-test the mechanics, and maybe me and my players are just luckier than average, but we only tend to see one failed roll for every four rolls made with a couple Advantage left over.

Exalted5 said:

This has been closer to my experience. I suspect that the discrepancy between testing experiences is probably due to either:

1. "Power level" of dice pools being rolled, i.e. Attrib/skill/difficult of the pool. In smaller/weaker pools, I suspect the issue is amplified, but I could be very very wrong on that.
2. Number of boost dice in the pool. The distribution of faces on the boost die is so geared toward producing advantages vs successes that I think it leads to a lot of the issues being seen.

My table's experience has been limited to relatively low levels of #1, and I noticed the problem more when #2 was engaged (my players kept ramping up boost dice like a described above in "Boost spirals").

Just some thoughts about why experiences may be different.

-WJL

Maybe I'm just poking a dead pig, but I keep going over what went wrong for our group (as we decided to drop playtesting the game from our routine.) Part of it was dice mechanics.

I got out my Warhammer dice and rolled out 20 rolls with equal numbers of the same-sized 'good dice' and 'bad dice'. Successes and failures were almost twice as frequent as banes (threats) and boons (advantages), with both tending to cancel each other out but allowing for more possibility of success or failure with little or no mitigating circumstance, with a few dramatic spikes in each category of success, failure, bane, and boon. Average success results 2.36, average failure results 1.84, average boon results 1.10, and average bane results 1.26.

It was almost upside down on the Star Wars dice app. My average number of successes, 1.89. My average number of failures, 1.42. My average number of advantages, 2.63. My average number of threats, 2.58.

I also tried flipping the values, under the assumption that the die facings can't change because the dice are in production, or close to it: advantages are successes, successes are advantages, threats are failures, and failures are threats. It makes for a very swingy game. I feel like the ideal solution would have been to just reduce the facings with advantages and threats and leave everything else alone.

These are small sample sizes, I know. But advantages and threats are more likely, and because we have values canceling each other out as well as differences in frequency, it creates a perception that all you're often left with are the circumstances instead of a conclusive result.

But here's my thought on this: people keep talking about how it's a paradigm shift, and people need to get used to it, and eventually they'll like it better than normal RPG systems, if they just stick it out and try it for a while. From my own experience and others, that's a lot to ask for a game that's meant to be played for fun, to ask people to keep at it for hours and hours until they "get used to it." I think it's a tough sell for an entire table of people to spend their free time 'getting used' to something.

By contrast, our group liked WFRP. The difference? Well, aside from the perceptions regarding character creation and development, it seems like it's the frequency of advantages/boons and threats/banes.

I agree it's a neat mechanic. But it's one that should have been applied in smaller doses when you're introducing it to people with a license that has mass market appeal. You don't get people to adopt 'paradigm shifts' by beating them over the head with it, not if you want mass market appeal. There will be a small percentage of adopters and supporters that might try to win their gamer friends over, but is that enough to sustain a game with an expensive license? It seems like it would have been better to ease into the mitigating circumstances.

Also, fewer, clearer options for how to spend it to move things along quickly would probably have helped a great deal for at least two of our players.

It would have felt more like space opera and high adventure science fantasy if the mitigating circumstances had been more rare, which is what Star Wars is, to have those mitigating circumstances, but less frequently by about a third. It shouldn't always be happening. Honestly, I sometimes feel like just the despair and triumph results would have been enough to get a good Star Wars feel. Then you'd have the "yes, you get away from the Stormtroopers but you wind up in a garbage compactor" situations. That's much more Star Wars than "You hit, and your gun james. You hit, and you're out of ammo. You miss, but the Stormtrooper is off balance." The mitigating circumstances should be more rare (and perhaps more dramatic.)

It seems weird that they took a tried and true system, then made the die sizes larger, the dice pools smaller, the frequency of results on the die facings saw an increase in mitigating results, and removed the one die type that allowed players to decide how much of this variability they wanted to deal with (stance dice.)

About the only solution that jumps out at me at this point is to introduce stance dice from WFRP as an optional rule for Star Wars and sell cheap boosters of them, flavoring them as the sort of recklessness and aggression that can lead to the dark side, or the calm and serenity that typifies the light, and allow players to swap out some of their regular dice for these stance dice, with reckless dice having more success and failure facings, and conservative dice having fewer advantage and threat facings. That way players will have a choice of how to mitigate some of the wild swings or high frequencies of advantages and threats. You wouldn't have to recast or reinvent the existing dice, just add two new types.

Exalted5 said:

This pretty much sums up my feelings perfectly. Love the mechanic in theory, but in play the mechanic has been cumbersome. From now on I'll be treating triumph/despair as three successes/failures and see if that makes any difference to the math (I suspect it'll just make things more swingy, but I'll give it a try).

I understand the "paradigm shift" theory, but I just don't think the game supports it in it's current state. There are simply too many advantages generated on failures, and too few options for how to spend them. This results in "analysis paralysis" and usually the "best" and most sensible thing to do is buy lots of little things with the advantage, which just slows the game down.

One of the things that occurred to me over the weekend, is what happens if you make triumph/despair explode rather than count as three successes? I.e.: on triumph/despair, roll an additional [proficiency]/[challenge] die and add it to the results.

While it might slow things down slightly, I think it'll: a) significantly increase the potency of triumph/despair; and b) make things more exciting (exploding dice always do).

Probably looking ahead a little here, but I really hope to see "Stance" Dice at least for stuff like Jedi, if not for Melee in general, I really like the way that works in Warhammer Fantasy. Especially if "Reckless" stances were associated somehow wit hthe Dark Side, and "Conservative" with the light side.

Also, as previously stated, a reference sheet or cards would be helpful with some of the possible results.

gribble said:

I really like this exploding dice idea, much more than the 'counts as 3 successes/failures' solution that some have been advocating. It makes the game more exciting and more variable. The 3 success/failure option means that rolling a Triumph is pretty much an auto win, and a Despair is more or less auto fail. Exploding dice means that people will be really involved when they roll Triumph and Despair.

Illya Mar said:

As one of the proponents of the "paradigm shift" point of view, I wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone is going to like it. I and the folks that I've played this game with happen to think it's pretty sweet, but your group obviously didn't. Not saying your group was in the wrong, but a part of me can't help but wonder if preconceived notions from having played WFRP3e had a role to play in the outcome, especially as most of the folks that I know & game with haven't played that game. It could just simply be that the dice mechanics aren't for you and your group. In spite of what gaming companies might wish, there's no such thing as a truly universal RPG that's going to please the entire customer base, and what works fine for one gaming group may simply be an unworkable mess for a different gaming group.

As for "beating folks over the head with the paradigm shift," that's one reason why there's such a broad and open Beta, so that FFG could get feedback like yours and mine on the dice mechanics. But for some gaming grognards, any change in game mechanics required to play a new RPG could be construed as "beating you over the head with a new way of doing things." I know a few folks that refuse to have anything to do with any version of D&D published by WotC, as those versions are very radical shifts from what they view as the "tried & true" mechanics of 1st and 2nd edition AD&D. I think they're nuts, but that's just a difference of opinion on our parts.

As I noted elsewhere, from what I've seen in the games I've played, we're not constantly running into the issue of "success but excess threats" or "failure but excess advantages," but it could just simply be that we've been rolling well above the norm. I'll admit to having had some incredibly good rolls for my character Auron in a Friday Skype game I play in, particularly during the second session when he pretty much held off a bunch of train-robbers all by himself, and that was before getting any XP awards.

If you'd be willing, perhaps do a series of test rolls switching just the Success and Advantage symbols, but leave the Threats and Failures as they are, and see what results you get?

Also, how many Difficulty dice are you using compared to a given number of Ability/Proficiency dice? Most of the rolls in the EotE games that I've been a player for have used an Average difficulty, occasionally with a Challenge die thrown in,, so a character with 2 Ability dice and a Proficiency die, or 2 Proficiency dice and 1 Ability die are going to have a much easier time of succeeding against an Average difficulty than a character with just 2 Ability dice, or even one with 1 Ability die and 1 Proficiency die.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but there is nothing wrong with just letting advantages and disadvantages sit if it is taking to much time. Obviously, you don't want to do this too often, but there were a couple times in our last session where we just ignored an extra advantage here or there.

Alternatively, an alternate rule could be to limit the uses of advantage/disadvantage to one per roll. So if you roll four advantages, you can do everything UP TO the four advantage level. This could really speed up combat and reduce the logistics of who has which boost/setback dice when their turn comes up.

Thoughts?

beeblebrox said:

This happens all the time in WHFRPG, lone boons/threats (adv/threat) just go unused because you find yourself in situations with no way to use them (It takes 2 boons to recover a fatigue, same should occur here with strain). I think it would be completely reasonable to increase the price of a lot of the "activate with X [Adv]" and understand that sometimes, adv gets wasted (By the maker, there's enough of it produced). Same thing goes for threat: if there's only one threat left, and no way to spend it… oh well.

beeblebrox said:

I actually kinda like this. You got 4 advantages? You can choose ONE option that costs four adv or less. OR one of each from the following:
Crit, weapon quality, general option (rec strain, extra maneuver, give a friend a boost, etc) My concerns would be:

1. Player decision paralysis.
2. Too much emphasis on weapon qualities/crits?
3. Monotonous decisions if the list was not very well crafted.

-WJL

beeblebrox said:

Yeah, I suggested this, in combination with a longer list of options for general/out of combat, as a reasonable compromise (assuming dice, symbols, etc aren't going to change now). For combat you really need to be able to select one critical effect, one weapon quality and one "general" thing I think though.

Funny, I had just assumed all expenditure of advantage was limited to one use per roll. That's how I've been running it, and thing have moved along quite fast.

Has anyone toyed with the idea of spending three advantage to buy one success? This might help to alleviate frequent "failure with lots of advantages" syndrome. Just a thought.

That's been mentioned. I feel like it would really mess with the dice mechanics big time though. All of a sudden, Threats and Advantages are always being converted to their counterparts, resulting in rolls that almost always end the way the roller wants them to. 3 may be a more reasonable number than 1 to 1, but I still feel like keeping them distinct is important.

Well, if the concern is that the system results in a lot of failed rolls with numerous advantage, that would help in at least that one situation. The rule could be limited so that it can only be done once, and only if that one additional success would mean the difference between success and failure.

beeblebrox said:

Presuming the "Convert 3 Advantage into 1 Success" was a "once per roll" kind of deal, I could see that being feasible.