In the movies we often see very powerful creatures trying to hit our heroes with a most likely lethal blow, such as smaug trying to smash a hobbit, or a cave troll smashing through the barricade and swinging his club at every hero, but the hero manages to just move out of the way before getting smashed.

In this game it is not like that at all, an enemy with 7 strength is almost certain to hit every time and do severe damage or kill the player outright.

I have been trying to come up with a way, that is fair, to reduce their chance to hit while not taking away their power. This is what I am thinking:

The max stat dice that can be used in your pool to hit is equal to your agility +1. So if your strength is 7 and your agility is 4, you can only use 5 of your strength dice to hit, all extra dice are considered converted into other benefits, forcing the character to use one of those support cards that convert dice into +1 damage, +1 Pierce, +1 critical.

This would make the strong not auto-hit every time, but when they do hit, it hurts like hell, because they have converted extra dice to critical hits.

My character has a strength of 4 with 2 fortune, and his agility is 3, so when going to hit someone he would roll his 4 blue as normal, but the 2 white dice would be removed from his pool and he would have +2 damage if the attack connects.

Rather than making a new rule (which could have unforseen ripple effects), why not just use those Enhance cards you alluded too when stating out your NPCs?

The problem that immediately springs to mind in regards to your proposed rule is that those Enhance cards have a recharge rating, so if a PC wanted to use them for all of his attacks it would cost a lot of XP and/or a lot of Fortune Points removing recharge counters. The same problem applies to NPCs, but they tend to see fewer turns over the course of a campaign, and the GM has control of their cards without having to fiddle the Advancement system.

As a second minor problem, your proposed rule makes the attributes uneven in value - every career that emphasizes Agility just got better and those that emphasize Strength just took a small hit.

Edit: I don't think the Enhance cards technically work the way you're proposing. I believe that as written, they can only remove one of each die type. So you couldn't trade in 2 white dice like in your example. It's been a while since I've read Omens of War, so I could be wrong.

I'd just add some more purple dice.

Have a look at SW where all melee is based on a minimum of two purple dice not one.

The best way not to get hit is to invest in the improved/advanced defences and Improved Guarded Position. And maybe invest in some of the "extra" active defences (such as bodyguard, interpose, celerety, dirty trick etc.) This lowers the risk of getting hit, and often lowers the amount of damage done when you're hit. Shrug it off will also help when you're hit.

There are also several actions which can inflict different conditions, such as cowed, rattled, demoralized or blinded for example, these conditions lowers the risk of a hit.

Furthermore, talents such as Roll with it or Armoured in Speed and similar can be used to mitigate damage/lower risk of getting hit.

The heroes in the movies have just put a lot of advances into defensive action/talent cards.

Thanks for your comments and points guys.

Another idea I was kicking around is characters and NPC's having to split their dice pool between "hitting the target" and dice they will use to generate extra success. This would be the same for Agility and Strength.

It would kinda be a gamble in that the character cannot get 3 success or higher results in the "hitting the target" pool. That is only to see if you get 1 success and any extra are discarded.

If you hit the target then you can roll the dice you set aside in the 2nd pool to see if you generate a greater result from the hit, generating boons and extra success results on the card.

So a character who wants to make sure he hits would throw all his dice into the first pool, but will only get the minimum benefit from the card. A character who wants to risk going for a head shot (the 3 success result on the card) would set aside a few dice for that. If he hits with the first pool he can go for the extra power of the card with the 2nd pool. If he misses then he gambled too many dice away.

I think this would stretch combat out longer, which is something i want, since we seem to always blow all our abilities in the first 2 or 3 rounds and it is done.

Right now all we are doing is adding a black die of defense per rank.

Still been thinking about this, and I think a simple answer is to make it so that no more than 5 stat dice (agility or strength) can be used To HIT. Any extra stat dice would only count towards damage. This would rarely ever affect a player, as it is not often a player has over 5, it would only apply to very powerful creatures like dragons.

Any objections to that?

If it's rarely going to apply to a PC, why make a rule? Why not just build your NPCs differently? Tweak their stats so they have fewer dice but a higher DR. It'll accomplish the same thing without adding any complexity at the table.

In SW EotE they added a new stat called silhouette. The bigger you are compared to your target, the more difficult it will be for you to hit him. You can do de same. Start with humans having silhouette 1 as a reference and go up to silhouette 3 or 4 for great deamons. For each difference in silhouette, add a purple or two black.

In SW EotE they added a new stat called silhouette. The bigger you are compared to your target, the more difficult it will be for you to hit him. You can do de same. Start with humans having silhouette 1 as a reference and go up to silhouette 3 or 4 for great deamons. For each difference in silhouette, add a purple or two black.

Awesome, i like it.. yeah the main thing I am looking for is large dragons not auto hitting every time for deathblows.

Or just ad a house rule to add different tiers of size. small, medium or giant if medium hits small he gets a black die, if a giant tries to hit a small character he gets 2 black die if a giant tries to hit a medium character he gets 1 black die

also works vice versa, small vs giants gains 2 white die or small vs medium gaints 1 white die

It makes sense because the smaller the more moveability

but the same thing should happen with the damage, small vs giant = -2 damage or giant vs small = +2 damage

I had issues initially with this as well. But I've accepted it as just part of the system. I know some guys want more heroic style combat (where the heroes are dodging hits left and right ala the LOTR movies), but I feel like this system is not really intended to be a heroic system. Not in that way. If you come up against an enemy with a 7 strength, he's going to drop a few of the PC's. It is what it is. That's an elite mob and it isn't intended to be easy. My 2 cents.

And I have played around with adding more misfortune dice and challenge dice to try and fix this, but the dice pool mechanic is not going to let you get the chance to hit low enough to get the effect you want. Not without breaking the system in half. Again, it just isn't designed for what you are looking to do.

I agree with previous posters that said that the game is designed to be gritty. But this said, you should encourage your players to buy Improved defences and use the Guarded position action more often. It does make quite a difference.

Lastly, as in real life, the real game changer on the battlefield is armour. Be as armoured as you can, it is the only real protection you have against large monsters.

In SW EotE they added a new stat called silhouette. The bigger you are compared to your target, the more difficult it will be for you to hit him. You can do de same. Start with humans having silhouette 1 as a reference and go up to silhouette 3 or 4 for great deamons. For each difference in silhouette, add a purple or two black.

Awesome, i like it.. yeah the main thing I am looking for is large dragons not auto hitting every time for deathblows.

Because WFRP is gritty, dragons are treated realistically. The whole idea that large monsters will miss small creatures is completely ludicrous. How much difficulty would a tiger have attacking a person? None at all. Can the person run away? Never. A tiger wants to eat you, you better either well armed and armoured and hope to strike the telling blow first, or else you're dead meat.

A mouse can outrun a human just because it is extremely fast for its size, and it is expert at using cover. Put a mouse in an empty room and the human will always capture it in the end. A human he size of a mouse would be as vulnerable as a kitten. Not fast enough, not good enough at hiding. Dead meat.

My point is that action scenes as presented in LOTR movies or other action films is high fantasy heroism that has no link whatsoever with real physics and real life. WFRP is designed to seem lifelike more than heroic. It's a mechanic, not perfect, but still pretty good at representing gritty "realistic" combat. Think Saving Private Ryan more than LOTR.

If you still want to play the agile hero against the lumbering giant, previous posters have suggested to add purple or black dice per size difference. It seems to me the better option. You can decide on the fly the level of added difficulty you want to give the dragon. Maybe the dragon is old and slow and deserves 2 added purple, or is young and quick and only deserves 2 blacks.

Keep in mind that purple dice equals much more chaos stars... Can make the monster look ridiculous as it blunders around fumbling and hurting itself all the time.

Previous poster mentioned improved dodge/parry/block. That is a very solid suggestion. And according to RAW, you can use more than one at a time so it is possible to really stack the odds in your favor for at least one hit from a big strong monster.

I want to repeat this however. The mechanics behind dice pools makes it impossible for you to drastically alter the odds enough. Even if the dragon has 4 challenge dice and 2 misfortune dice in his pool (assumed strength based attack so 2 conservative, 5 characteristic and 1 fortune as the Dragon's base), it still has a 53% chance of getting at least one hammer. And that is before the GM tosses in aggression and expertise dice (which a Dragon gets 8/6 respectively). Adding one expertise and one aggression bumps the success chance back up to 68%. And this is with 4 challenge dice.

No amount of dragon nerfing can get the effect you want. Not with the dice pool mechanic in this game as written. And I'm cool with that personally. Dragons should hit often and be lethal. They're Dragons.

The best way not to get hit is to invest in the improved/advanced defences and Improved Guarded Position. And maybe invest in some of the "extra" active defences (such as bodyguard, interpose, celerety, dirty trick etc.) This lowers the risk of getting hit, and often lowers the amount of damage done when you're hit. Shrug it off will also help when you're hit.

There are also several actions which can inflict different conditions, such as cowed, rattled, demoralized or blinded for example, these conditions lowers the risk of a hit.

Furthermore, talents such as Roll with it or Armoured in Speed and similar can be used to mitigate damage/lower risk of getting hit.

The heroes in the movies have just put a lot of advances into defensive action/talent cards.

This is a great post.

Really really late to this discussion but I think there is something else that can also be considered....

The scenes which are being described are often with the large critter trying kill the small hero and that hero trying to do NOTHING but survive. Frodo isn't trying to 'hurt' the troll in the Cave Troll scene...he is merely trying to dodge around and avoid being killed.

In that situation in-game I would allow the player to use terrain (like that pillar in LOTR) to gain additional challenge/misfortune dice as 'cover'. And if you're in a small area, I'd increase that even more (I even impose penalties for great weapons in smaller areas). Finally, in desperate situations (heavily overmatched, merely trying to survive) I would allow the player to use Fortune points to add misfortune dice to the enemy pool.

Would this prevent a hit vs the dragon listed above? No, not really. But at least it give a chance and vs anything not that overpowering, it has proven to allow non-combat/overmatched characters to survive long enough to escape or to have someone else intervene.

I actually typed up some Silhouette rules a while back, but we have not used them yet.