I was accidentally having players roll Average (2d) checks for all combat dice pools for over a year before we realized that the base is supposed to be Easy (1d). Upon discovering this, we actually decided to stick with the Average (2d) difficulty, as my players said it made combat "grittier" and "more realistic" and "made sense thematically". I mean, wouldn't swinging a sword at someone be a little more difficult than "easy"?

Anywho, I saw over at THIS thread, that others were up-ing their base difficulties for spell casting as well.

GMs: What scale do you base the difficulties for checks on? Do you use the RAW, or do you have houserules for this sorta thing? If so, what's been your experience with making things a bit harder for your PCs?

I've pesonally found that as my players have moved up in Ranks and experience (most of them moving into their 3rd careers at this point), encounters and combat have grown with them. In other words, when they started out at Rank 1, encounters and combat felt truly challenging and difficult (most checks and combat pools being made at and Average (2d) or harder difficulty). I've heard folks complain that characters feel too powerful at lower Ranks in this edition as opposed to older (1st/2nd) editions...this simple houserule seems to fix that problem.

I typically add a lot of black or purple dice due to complications to the situation.

I also try to look at the statistics of it. At what % do I want my players to succeed? I feel it's important for GMs to look at the probabilities. There is a thread about "balancing" the dice. What does that mean? That means that those GMs want exactly a 50/50% chance of success at any given action right? I actually prefer that the odds be in favor of the players so we're not suffering from WFRP2 syndrome of 47 rounds of successive swing-and-a-miss. The beauty of the purple die is that no matter your chance of success, you always have the exact same chance of something going horribly wrong. Since I tend to just add more purple dice (because we allow 2 eagles to cancel a chaos star), my players realize that there is a truly, wild, random element to any action.

"Any action worth doing, is worth risking getting a chaos star."

jh

With all the defence cards and the new advanced defences that add a challenge and a bane to the result on top of the challenge die, hit rate at higher ranks is actually quite balanced. We tried a 2d approach for one session, but when players and npcs use defence cards on top of that, the hit rate actually became too low. Never thought I'd see that, but our almost rank 3 characters and the npcs missed more than they hit and the boon/bane balance was messed up.