Reading Emirikol's "Do the characters get tougher" thread I remembered wondering often if it is worthwhile, gamewise, to spend advances on active defenses. Do you see getting better defences really translates in characters avoiding attacks and staying alive? Or is it more like D&D AC, where even if you get evrything you can to raise your AC, the Attack Bonuses gets so high with higher level enemies that AC just can't keep up with it.

My players all took improved defenses - adding a challenge die is good.

That said, it's warhammer so you are always at risk of getting smacked good.

Defenses rarely help to avoid getting hit - but they do often save you from criticals or nasty high success damage lines, and the advanced defenses all have a nice sideeffect ei. Adv Parry allowing you to remove a token from an attack such as Riposte

I remembered wondering often if it is worthwhile, gamewise, to spend advances on active defenses. Do you see getting better defences really translates in characters avoiding attacks and staying alive?

No, but really Yes. Upgrading from 1 or 2 black to 1 purple will only minimally impact how often you get hit... but it will help in other ways. Remember that attacks are not binary pass/fail in nature. The attack roll is also the damage roll. While Improved Dodge will rarely cancel the attack entirely, it may downgrade the effect or wreck the attacker.

One thing that might not be obvious from the player's perspective is that many of the monster actions include a chaos star (or multiple bane) result that's devastating and/or hilarious. Adding an extra purple doesn't just mean the attack is less likely to hurt the PC, it's also more likely the monster will hurt itself and its allies. If a goblin henchman rolls a chaos star, hilarity ensues and the fight scene gets about a turn shorter.

Beyond that, remember that Improved defenses all have some sort of extra effect for when the attack actually does miss. Whether or not the card is worth the XP depends at least partly on whether or not your build can take advantage of that extra effect. I wouldn't bother with Improved Parry for a Wizard or a Priest. Not all characters will reliably have something meaningful to do with the bonus maneouvre granted by Improved Dodge, but a character armed with a blackpowder weapon will love it.

The "Hero's Call" supplement added a third tier to the defenses, so there's an Advanced Parry, Advanced Block and Advanced Dodge cards available. They seem pretty strong to me, enough so that I think they are worth both upgrade investments, even if you were on the fence about the Improved version that precedes them.

Defenses rarely help to avoid getting hit - but they do often save you from criticals or nasty high success damage lines

This. Every black die you can throw at your opponent saves you from the dreaded crit.

jh

You can build a hit-proof character, but what's better is if you build a hit resistant party.

I have two good examples:

1. That f*cking watchman.

My old campaign had a dwarf watchman in it, not even an iron breaker mind, with the saga of grungni. If he was getting attacked by anything with less that strength four, he laughed off most attacks. He could throw three, four or more misfortune and a standard two challange dice at an attack.

2. Fire and steel.

Myself and and another player in Dan Wise's online game, (anyone seen him lately?) had a routine, one used Improved Guarded Position, the other milled into bad guys, it cut down on the amount of damage we were throwing out, but massively improved our defences, with enemies rolling up to three challange dice AND allowing us to knock recharge off our favourite actions, it's a really good teamwork move and can kick ass for your survivability.

Finally, Emirikol is quite right, misfortune dice on their own aren't all that BUT they stop enemies activating the vicious range of possible crits that could spell messy end for your character.

Great replies, and fast answers! This forum seems to be smoking hot. :] Good to come back and read your opinions, guys.

Many creatures have quite "bad" dice pools to begin with, relying more on quite "powerful" action cards that require few successes/boons to do a lot of damage/criticals. As they have few expertise dice and a lower number of stance dice creatures tend to get less successes. In that scenario, throwing in a purple die can really make a difference.

For monsters the improved defences are less efficient, as the players often have better dice pools and often will score good hits no matter the defences used.

Really good comments. I've found that regardless of my character's total defense, he still gets pounded.

As has been mentioned in other threads, SOAK is really important with regard to survival. I recently took the talent "Roll With It" to absorb a couple of wounds if (or rather when) my character gets hit. And a side-note: for the Enemy Within reboot I have the "Battle Scarred" character whose special ability is as follows:

Once per session, when a Battle-Scarred character inflicts or suffers a critical wound, he may draw 3 and choose which to apply. Shuffle the others back into the deck.

Very handy ability!

Interesting. Your guy knows how to get hurt. Great MMA fighters can teach us how this really applies. But I never thought about it regarding criticals...