As the title asks: Are any of these rules real or are they all house-rules? I only have access to the Player's Guide, whereas the DM has access to all the books, so in some of these questions he's blatantly going against the Player's Guide, so I'm left wondering if these rules are countermanded in a different book.
1. Our archers do 1 damage against skeletons. This is because the minimum damage on a hit is always 1. The DM is saying that all piercing attacks would normally hit for 0 on skeletons. (This is a big one. Three of our 6 characters are archers and one of our 3 melee characters uses a Rapier. So only 2 out of 6 characters can hit for more than 1 damage, even on a crit.)
2. If you go into a career that has an advanced skill, you acquire that skill for free, automatically. (A player went into Apprentice Wizard and was able to purchase 1 dot in Channeling for 1xp, 1 dot in the casting skill for 1xp, and 1 dot in Mystic Sight for 1xp ... and he had not acquired any of them.)
3. To determine the amount of purple dice used in combat, compare your attack stat to the same stat for the enemy. For example, if you are making a melee attack, for each 2 points you are above their stat, reduce the purple dice by 1. Purple dice begin at 3 and go down to 1 if you have Strength 6 or Agility 6.
4. Armor stacks, it just lowers the effectiveness of the stacking armor by 1. So you can stack the Ironbreaker Armor with Leather Armor. Ironbreaker Armor is 2 black dice, 5 soak, I think. Leather Armor is 0 black dice, 2 soak (once again, I think). If you wear both, the Leather Armor only adds 1 soak. So our Ironbreaker is wearing 4 different kinds of armor and can literally only be hurt for 1 point of damage with every attack because he soaks so much damage.
5. The engagements don't make sense to me. I can be engaged with an ally who is engaged with an enemy, but I do not have to be engaged with the enemy. Furthermore, disengaging too fast will result in an "Opportunity Attack". And I can disengage behind an ally who is very close to me and the enemy can't get past that ally to swing at me. One person can engage only one enemy at a time. Multiple people can engage the same enemy, but you can never engage more than one enemy at a time.
6. A Fortune Point (FP) can be spent to negate any attack coming your way. This has literally saved my "not armored butt" a couple of times. It seems way too powerful, though. Especially when combined with the party card: Brash Young Fools (BYF). The GM has ruled that we put the new FP onto BYF at the start of a new round. So, we use a FP to ignore the attack, and if we run out of personal FP's, we can take from BYF to avoid the attack. Basically, at least one attack will ALWAYS miss every round, even if we are all out of our personal FP's, as we will just steal from BYF.
7. See #6. I assume we are using BYF incorrectly because, otherwise, there's no reason for anyone to ever pick a party card except for BYF. That's ridiculously powerful.
8. Fortune Points can be spent retroactively. Fail a check? Keep spending a FP until you succeed. (Ironically, this makes one of our group talents a bit silly. We have a talent that lets us add 2 white dice for an untrained skill check, so if we've failed the roll and want to spend FP's to get fortune dice, we get 2 per FP with that talent, rather than 1 if we are trained.)
9. I keep reading on the forums about how dangerous diseases and insanities are, but we've not seen one. We're barely getting fatigue or stress, which seems like it would be the thing that would lead to insanities. We've played 6 sessions so far and I've received a total of 0 in both. Others have received some by getting the crit failure in combat and getting 1 fatigue. Or, we've had a tiny amount of stress come into play only when we roll a crit failure on a fear check at the beginning of every combat.
10. Which reminds me, we roll a Fear check at the beginning of every combat. So far, we've only fought undead, but we've fought them several times. Always the exact same skeletons. Does the penalty always remain the same? So if we fight these exact same skeletons 100 times, we have to make a Fear check 100 times?
11. This one's already been corrected in another thread, but I'm ranting at this point. There's no limit on how we improve our skills. So, as a Scribe, I get 4 skill points, but I can put 3 of them into Discipline to raise that up to 3 and drop the last one into Education, for example.
12. (Flavor question) Is it really the mission of the Troll and Giant Hunter careers to die and that's why they don't wear armor?
13. I'm a bit confused on the dedication bonus. If you complete a career (10 points in class), do you automatically get the dedication bonus or are you required to spend an 11th xp just for the dedication bonus?
14. I can't remember the name of it, but there's a basic action card that lets you give a bonus to defense for all allies in your engagement (1 hammer = 1 black dice to all attacks and 3 hammers = 2 black dice). I think you roll Willpower + Discipline or something like that. It doesn't have any dice on it, but it is an action in combat. Do you automatically add purple dice to it when rolling it or not?
15. Same as #14, except for magic spells like Magic Dart. Does this get a purple dice or not? And when quick casting, do you add a purple dice? Our confusion stems from the fact that it doesn't have a penalty dice on the card.
16. We did a contested action against the enemy. I figured a contested action would just be "they both roll their stats with any penalty dice or fortune dice as deemed by the GM and compare the results". Instead, the GM gave the player 3 of the purple dice and said that was the difficulty, then rolled 0 purple dice for himself. Was this correct?
I'm sure there will be more later after I've had time to think on it some more. This is just what came to my immediate mind. Thanks in advance, guys!
