Destructor said: I had this question last night as well! Er... what was the answer? It does _not_ end the round. So if the marines use an action card that empties a blip pile, after you resolve all of their actions, you move to the new location. So you'd place new terrain cards, and if the new location has a special effect that happens upon arriving, you'd resolve that. Then, you'd draw the event card, use it's effect and spawn and move genestealers as directed. Only then would you go back to the start of the round and choose actions again.

Destructor said: Forgive me, but in the green deck (the original deck), there are three cards for each level, and in the red deck (expansion deck) there are two. Doesn't this imply that the red cards are 'harder' than the green cards, and that mixing the green and up might disrupt the game balance, which is pretty finely tuned and would probably tilt in favour of the stealers if you mixed them up, especially if you're dealing out three cards, where if you just played the red deck you'd only get two. I've not tested this with gameplay, but it's my general sense. No, it doesn't imply that the red cards are harder. Are you sure you're using the numbered location cards correctly? It doesn't matter that green has 3 cards of each "level" and red only 2, because you _don't_ play all the cards of a level in one sitting. You _don't_ get more cards in play in the green deck. You play with the same number of cards regardless of whether you're playing red or green. In a game, regardless of whether you're using red or green, you should have a card numbered "2", a "3", a "4", and either a "1A", "1B", or "1C" depending on the voidlock being used (which is itself determined by the number of players in the game). It's that with green you'll pick one out of three at each level, and with red you'd pick one out of two possible cards. So it just means that when playing red, you'd see more repetition from one game to the next. On a related note, the location numbers are the sequence they occur in under the default rules, but that is not neccessarily the power level or difficulty of the room. If you look closely at the location decks, you'll actually see that frequently the later rooms are actually easier on the marines than the early rooms.

Destructor said: The setup goes fine. I lay everything out as is shown clearly in the manual. Then I choose orders, that's fine too. There's no genestealers on the board so that round goes by. Then I draw an encounter card and... I'm utterly lost. How do genestealers spawn? It says they spawn on 'terrain cards of that colour', but there ARE no terrain cards out at this stage, and I haven't seen anything that indicates when they should be drawn. Effectively, you're skipping a couple steps in set-up. Look on page 8 of the rulebook, and re-read steps 7 and 8 on that page. If that still leaves you confused, page 9 and page 26 might also be helpful. Here's what I suspect you're missing: Step 7: After you build the formation of marines, you need to place the Void Lock card (referred to as the "Setup Location card" on page 8 of the rules), which will tell you where the initial terrain cards are placed near the formation. Terrain cards aren't really a deck: you don't draw them at random, you place them at each location in a pattern specified by the symbols on the location card (the first of which is always a Void Lock). If it's still alluding you, look closely at the setup diagram on page 9; it shows you where the four location cards go in a 4-player game so that may help you figure out the symbols on the void lock. Step 8: You also mentioned that there's no genestealers on the board when you choose orders for the first round, which indicates that you're missing step 8. Before the marines ever choose their first action card, there will already be some genestealers on the board. You draw one Event card as the final step of set-up and only resolve the bottom portion of it that indicates how many genestealers to place at which terrain cards. The setup diagram on page 9 shows a swarm of genestealers in place, though their number and position is just a random example.

My instinct is to say that the rule is not pointless at all, specifically because of the Instinct cards. When an event card with Instinct printed on it is drawn, you're supposed to make the decision without feedback from the other players. Let's say you draw the "Gun Jam" card. You have to pick the fireteam that can't shoot this turn, and do so without talking to the other players. If you could see the other people's hands, it takes less memory or skill to figure out which team has another action available that's worth doing. I'll also echo Myrm's response that one reason is to keep shy, quiet, casual or inexperienced gamers from being bossed around. Being able to talk about their hands lets them ask for help if they need it, but since others can't see their cards, they'll be slightly less likely to be pressured or ordered around. For most play groups this is a non-issue, but if you've got a few overbearing veterans and one meek newbie at the table, every little buffer helps.

TheWagon said: I understand you said it doesn't happen all that often anyway, but by doing this you're also leaving out a green spawning point. How about you place the Corridor Terrain instead? That's not a perfect fix, either, though. The Artefact card is green spawn point only until it's activated, then it leaves play and goes to your hand. Since you get to place it anywhere on the formation you want, you'll generally put it near someone that can afford to Move & Activate on the next turn. More often than not, that green spawn point will only be there for a single turn. Placing a corridor would have an impact for multiple turns. Checking the card, i see also that the location 4 that places an artefact also already has a corridor, so you'd still be lacking an appropriate card. You could just say "there's a green spawn point _here_ for this turn" and indicate a space... that would minimize the ripple effects. As long as you've got a good memory. I'm okay with the benefit of not having a green spawn point (for the one turn it would have lasted) being counteracted by the lack of a second artefact to place (and thus one more dead marine in the end game). It'll only come up slightly less than 1 game in 25 (1 in 5 chance of an artefact in location 3, followed by 1 in 5 chance of an artefact in location 4, and then only if you still have the artefact in hand when you enter location 4), so it's not a huge deal either way.

Tunte said: (off topic) @ r_b_bergstrom: I just must ask, you are also from Sweden, right? I just got to know. I'm from the United States, actually. I do have family in Sweden, though, and I spent a month there one summer in my teens. Beautiful country. I'd love to go visit again some day.

nickelcity said: Regarding the location deck, do you think it possible to mix the core and expansion together? The rule card on the expansion seems to indicate they want the two decks to remain seperate, but I thought it would be cool to mix them. I'd say go for it, I've tried it, and nothing goes terribly awry by mixing the red and green decks. The extra cards helps keep the game fresh. Actually, my wife and I have recently mixed the decks beyond just green & red. We realized that since we almost always play 2-player, we were getting very familiar with some locations (1C through 4), but had barely seen any of the 1A & 1B locations. So, we made a single deck of 1A, 1B, 1C, 2 and 3 all shuffled together. Now when we play, we deal out three random locations from that mixed deck, and then a final location from a deck of just location 4 (both red & green). It works pretty well, and really makes the game unpredictable. There is however, at least one issue that can come up if you mix the decks, but it's easy to fix and doesn't wreck the game in any way. Both the green and the red deck each have a location with the artifact terrain, and these two locations don't have the same number. Since the artefact goes to your hand when you activate it, it's possible to essentially need to have two copies in play. (One on the table and one in hand, or even 2 in players hands.) Given all the cards available in the decks, it doesn't come up too often. Luckily, there's an easy solution when it does come up: Just subject that card to the same limitations that reign in the Support Tokens. So, if the card is in someone's hand at the time you're directed to place it at a location, it remains in the hand and you don't place the new one.

Tunte said: I got a somewhat similar query about "armour of contempt". Can it be used if a swarm is behind the marine? We in my group believes so. The rules states that "support tokens can't be used to re-roll when defending if the swarm is behind". We ruled, since you don't just use them to re-roll, you still get +1 for each support token on the marines for one roll. But if that fails, the marine dies. I agree. As I read it, it would definitely give the bonus on attacks from behind.

Tyrichter said: When I unpacked the game for the first time, i got the same question: Does the Armour of Contempt raise the defense only by 1 in general, or it raises the defense by 1 for every single token? 1 per token, as mentioned in my previous post. Tyrichter said: I personally think, it raises defense only by 1 in general, regardless of the number of tokens (of course you have to have at least 1 token for it to take effect). The reason is, that after a while the Grey Team would become an unstoppable tank. I think, there is 12 support tokens, so if you would put them all on Chaplain Raziel, which can happen in only several rounds, he would be able to withstand an attack of at least 11 genestealers (yes, I remember, Gideon can block any attack with his shield, but this is balanced by his crappy range), in the next round, he would use Traumatic Blow, and the GS would be paralysed, again, having no chance to harm him. That´s just overpowered. If you would put 6/6 tokens on both marines in the Grey Team, they would become extremely powerful juggernauts, and that just seems unfair to me. They´we got a lot of powerful abilities (along with the new Orange Team), unlike other teams, and this would just make them... well... ultrapowerful. I suspect you are over-estimating the power of the ability on Armour of Contempt, and that even using it to give +1 PER token on the marine (which I believe is what the rules-as-written intend) it's not that likely to be the game-warping advantage you're expecting it to be. Yes, you could theoretically lump all 12 tokens on Chaplain Raziel. It would take a couple turns of very dedicated use of Support cards to do so. And then he'd be immune to any swarm of 11 genestealers or less, and could theoretically survive against a swarm of 15 with a lucky roll. For one turn. Yes, the next turn Chaplain Raziel could prevent a single swarm from attacking, and then alternate those two cards to hold down one huge swarm for a very long time provided everything worked out just right. However, he'd still be vulnerable to attacks from behind on every second turn, and if additional genestealers spawned or moved behind him, or the first swarm flanked him, or the "chaos of battle" event turned all the marines around, he'd get ripped apart. So you might be able to pull it off for a few turns in a row, but it's likely to eventually collapse (especially as you move to new locations), and then that stack of nearly a dozen genestealers will starting devouring one marine per turn. In the meantime, having so many resources tied up on one guy will likely start to hurt you elsewhere. Remember that the hard limit is a dozen tokens (the number that come in the box), so using the strategy described above, there would be little or no tokens available for other marines, none to use to whittle down that huge swarm, none for doors, none for the end location that requires 10 support tokens to win, etc. Just as with the Power Field or Intimidation, over-reliance on any card that doesn't actually kill genestealers can easily backfire. Similar arguments can be made about putting 6 tokens on each of the two marines in the team, though it is less of an "eggs in one basket" scenario. Yes, it's strong, but it's far from a guaranteed victory, and all it takes is one bad card draw for it to all fall apart. Tyrichter said: I had even another questions, on of them was also about the Armour of Contempt: Does it raise armor rating for both marines, even if only one of them has a support token? But I think it is logically impossible. The token represents some upgrade to that team member, and if one of them does not have the token, he is not upgraded. With the way the card is written, I strongly believe the number of support tokens on the other marines is irrelevant, even if they are from the same player or fire team. If Brother Metraen is defending (for example), he cares only if there's counters on himself, and not how many are on Chaplain Raziel, or anyone else. Tyrichter said: Using Orange Team´s Cyclonic Volley, you throw a die, which will set Brother Adron´s range of fire. If roll is a 0, nothing happens. Does that mean, that if the die roll is 3, he can attack only positions 1 to 3, but not 0 (GS engaged with him)? This would simulate the destructive potential of the rocket launcher, but the card says "slay GS UP TO THIS NUMBER OF POSITIONS" which means, even 0 position is possible, and I would rather play it that way. I also think, that Cyclonic Volley easily beats Brother Claudio´s Heroic Charge (if Adron rolls 0, nothing happens, if Claudio rolls 0, he dies) in the effect and even the range which is again... kinda unfair Nothing in the rules prevent him from targeting his own row. Since this isn't an RPG, the rules trump logic. As to the Adron vs Claudio debate, I think they're closer to balanced then they might initially appear. If Claudio rolls a "0" he dies, but the three genestealers die with him. If Adron rolls a "0" the three genestealers stay in play, and they have a very good chance of killing a marine at the end of the turn (and possibly for several turns in a row). So while Claudio looks (and is) riskier, he is also (oddly) more reliable. Tyrichter said: Next question: Target Lock: Can a swarm be "targeted" multiple times? The Target Lock "highlights" the enemy, makes them a little bit more vulnerable. In "reality", I think you wouldn´t get an advantage if the target would be targeted multiple times by a single laser pointer. How would even that work? So logically, it should be impossible to target the same swarm multiple times. But the cards do not put any restrictions on this, so... I think it is possible. Last one: Can the Target Lock´s token be used to reroll an attack from behind? I think, it´s not possible, because the basic rules put restrictions on ANY rerolling while defending from behind. For the first Target Lock question, I think yes, you can have multiple support tokens on a swarm, because nothing on the card or rules say you can't. Again, for a card game, we should generally seek guidance from the rulebook, not the in-character logic. If this were an RPG instead of a card game, I might go the other way. As to the last question, I've been playing it as allowing to reroll attacks from behind, but on reconsidering, I'm not sure that's right. I thought of it as "special" tokens, in the way that support tokens on doors don't function using anything like the normal rules. On further reflection, though, one could argue it's actually just a normal support token being used in the normal way, and just stored (or located) somewhere odd. Hmm...what to do? Target Lock is a weird card. The default for most cards is that they only do things during the turn they are played, but target lock seems to break that pattern by putting a support token on a swarm and allowing it to be used later. I'd love for FFG to update the FAQ to cover the many issues with Target Lock.

Sorry to necro an old thread, but I believe the answer given here (in regards to Armor of Contempt) is incorrect, and it'd be a shame if it mislead someone into playing the card wrong. I firmly believe what the card does is give +1 to your defensive roll per support token on that marine. So if you have 3 tokens on the marine, he gets +3 to his roll. So he's (for this round) immune to attacks by 1 or 2 genestealers, and could theoretically survive the round even if facing a swarm of 7 genestealers if the die were kind. The rules card says "...he only gains a +1 for the remaining tokens still on his card" to clarify that if you spend a support token, the bonus decreases by 1 on the reroll the token gave you. For example, lets say you had 3 support tokens on the marine and were facing a swarm of 5 genestealers. You roll a "0", which is adjusted by +3 to a "3". That's not enough to survive, so you spend a support token and reroll. The new roll is (for example) a "1", and it's only adjusted by +2 because there are now only 2 support tokens on the marine. 1+2=3, so this roll is also effectively a "3", and not enough to survive. So you spend another support token and reroll yet again. Maybe you get a little higher roll this time, say a "4"... but since you've spent 2 support tokens you've only got one left on the marine, making this a roll effectively 4+1="5", still not enough to survive the swarm. You could at this point spend your last token, but since there wouldn't be any tokens left on the marine, you'd be rolling with no bonus (a +0 bonus, technically). The highest you could roll on this last reroll is a "5", which again isn't more than the number of genestealers in the swarm, so you'd die.

I'd assumed the extra set of red and green dice was because the symbols are so much harder to read on the other ones. At least, on the original red and greens in my boxed set, the eagles and hour glasses (boons and delays) were poorly formed and not completely inked. The replacement set had slightly different shaped symbols, and they were easier to read because of it.

Pulled muscle. Torn ligament. Hyperextended elbow or knee. Stubbed toe. Especially if it's just one point, it doesn't have to be as comedic/dramatic as "he stabs himself".

Just a thought: You could probably make a "Mostly Literate" talent. Off the top of my head, I'd call it a Focus talent. A character with this talent is considered literate whenever they've got it slotted in. But since it has to be slotted in, it would represent a lower level of literacy... you can read, but it's not completely natural for you, and you have to concentrate and focus on it to do so. You're perhaps a little slow at it, and is really hard to do if there's distractions or complications going on (because they might require your talent slots being used for some other bonus or effect). This would make functional literacy reasonably cheap (1 xp) without taking too much away from the actual Education skill.

Silverwave said: Last session, our Waywatcher wanted to climb on a roof. She wanted to use her high agility (5) to get to the top, but soon noticed Athletics was Str based and failed 3 rounds in a row to get to the roof. What did you set the difficulty of the roll at? Were there any location cards in play? Was the PC in a hurry, or was time not an issue? Rather than changing what stat they could roll, I'd be more inclined to skip the roll if there was no pressure, or throw some situational bonuses at them. Changing the stat sets a precedent and allows this character a long-term advantage of always being able to roll their best stat for this task. Simply saying "this is an easy roof to climb" doesn't set a precedent unless you expect numerous scenes at this particular building. Another (minor?) thing to keep in mind is that the PC in question is a Wood Elf (has to be, since they're a Waywatcher). Their "Forest Walk" racial ability is bound to make climbing a tree easier than climbing a roof. So if you set up a precedent that makes them good at climbing in the urban setting, they'll do even better in the rural. Plus, if the player really wants to get on that roof , they've got a lot of resources they should be utilizing. Conservative stance. Fortune points. Getting an assist from another player. Figuring out a cool or clever way to interact with the terrain. Taking two turns to stack up some old crates in the alleyway instead of making the exact same roll three turns in a row. Shooting arrows into the wall to use as pitons. Making the exact same roll again and again is far from the optimal play, especially given the free-flowing situational modifiers and sliding difficulty scale in this game. Even if they tried the same exact thing all over again I might tell them "Your first attempt was tiring (take a fatigue), but it gave you insight into how not to go about this (get an extra white die or two for the second roll)." Or maybe even "It's okay you failed. That really wasn't a roll to see if you could get up on the roof, it was a roll to see how long it took you and whether or not there'd be any fatigue involved." Depends on the situation, and whether or not there were any potentially interesting consequences to failure. In a chase scene, a failure might mean not getting up there (as that would be a major factor in whether or not the prey escapes the predator). In an espionage/burglary scene failure might mean making a noise (so now you have to roll Stealth or be spotted). Might even have them roll, and only care about boons, banes, comets and chaos stars. (In other words, getting up there is automatic, but we want to know if anything exciting happens in the meantime.) If neither of those complications (scene types) is going on, I'd probably just waive the roll. Sometimes GMs (myself included) get caught up on the letter of the rule (in this case the notion that "any climbing should require an Athletics check") and forget to ask themselves "is there anything interesting to be gained by the PC failing this check?"

Turns out I was wrong. In cleaning up the spreadsheet to figure out how to best post it's data here, I discovered flaws in my formulas. I had fallen victim to Confirmation Bias, and passed it along to all of you. Sorry. Looks like I was over-estimating what percentage of challenge symbols on the defense die would actually affect the quality of the hit. It was just an aspect of the specific stats I was looking at to generate my numbers, and I was seeing a pattern that didn't actually exist. I'd thought soak was just a hair's breadth better (and thus the higher variance of increased Defense would be preferable because it's more fun and memorable at what seemed like no real disadvantage), when in reality for most pools Soak is much better. So, backpedaling frantically: Fresnel was right, the gap between Defense and Soak is much bigger than I was believing it to be. @Fresnel: Thank you for asking to see my numbers. I wouldn't have caught my mistake without having to reformat and re-examine them.

One can reasonably argue the soak point is better, but it's better only by a really slim margin. It won't really shine unless the campaign is exceptionally long (so the tiny margin, multiplied across hundreds of battles amounts to something real). With a shorter campaign, or a one-shot, your black die's rolls could vary really far off the statistical average, and thus be a total wild-card that makes comparison meaningless. Honestly, the math is really close between a single point of soak and a single point of defense. Really close. The same set of variables (skills and strength of involved characters) that mark a soak point as about a 10% decrease in damage also mark a defense die as about a 9.44% increase in damage. Start adjusting stats in various directions and you can make the gap wider or smaller, but for nearly all characters they're going to be nearly the same, and ultimately the variable you're tweaking to push the gap in one direction or the other are really subjective. A soak and a defense are practically the same thing, with the soak being more predictable and the defense having a lot more variance. (It's kind of like the whole red-side vs green-side debate, where most cards are actually a lot closer to dead-even balanced on both sides, despite looking much better on the red.) So then it comes down to what will you feel more? In general, I think you're going to all but ignore that extra 0.6% boost (or whatever) the soak gives you, you just won't notice it. It's not that often a PC gets K.O.'d by exactly one point, in my experience. Usually the second or third hit drops you a couple points below zero, anyway. On the other hand, the handful (usually around 5%) of attacks where that misfortune die prevented you from getting hit at all will often stick out and feel more dramatic. You'll like at the dice pool and say "man, that little black die saved my bacon!" It makes for memorable gaming, which is a good thing. (p.s.: If anyone's interested in seeing the math behind the numbers I mention above, remind me next week and I'll try to get it into a legible format I can post here. I won't have time for that formatting and clean-up till Monday at the earliest. Too much goin' on this weekend.)

There's no need to put your recharge tokens inside the book. Most (all?) the monster pages have four actions on them, in sort of a 2x2 grid. So, behind my GM's screen, or off to the side of the table if I'm not using a screen, I make (up to) four little piles of recharge tokens. If there's more than one action recharging at a time, I orient them in roughly the same 2x2 grid pattern that the book page uses. If I have more than one monster or NPC, I use the same four areas, but use different colors of tokens. This works well for all but the most complex fights. If I'm planning a really complicated battle (lots of foes, or foes from several different pages in the books) I'll usually print out monster sheets using Strange Eons. It's a little ink-intensive, but it looks nice and is great for customizing foes. If I don't have the time (or ink) for that, or I'm improvising, or the fight got complicated unexpectedly because of player action, etc,... I just grab a piece of scratch paper and draw a few 2x2 grids of boxes, and then label them "orc boss", "orcs", "goblins", "boar", "wolves", etc. Maybe 10 to 15 seconds worth of work at the start of a fight, uses 1 sheet of paper per battle. I can live with that.

Kryyst said: Perhaps more importantly is that while the characters are hitting more often, the monsters usually are too since they are build around a similar set of capabilities. WFRP 3 has left the world of Whack-a-mole behind and it's a much better game because of it. I agree 100%

gruntl said: There's no need to add something else in for the other 14% because all the results of the yellow dice were actually already figured in to the base probability charts. Rather than adding something to the red results for those 14%, the more accurate representation would be to subtract one success or one boon from the 5% of results where the comet effect was invoked. Technically, if you were using that benefit and getting the extra 0.25 average damage from the severity, then you'd be missing out on some other benefit, such as getting to ignore armour soak. Hmm, are you certain this is the case? The probability calculator does not output comets, and I'm very much doubting that it converts comets into successes or boons in the way you assume. But you may be correct, no way to know unless someone with knowledge on the actual code can give input. But it doesn't matter much for the comparison since both red and green will benefit from this effect. Yes, I'm certain. There's an easy test for it. I went to the probability tool and entered 1 yellow die, nothing else in the pool. A yellow die has 6 sides, being 2 w/ boons, 1 w/ success, 1 w/ righteous success, 1 w/ comet and 1 blank. So, if the probability tool is counting comets as a success, then the chance of getting 1 or more successes should be exactly 50% (because 3 sides are giving 1 or more success). If it's not counting comets as successes, then the chance should to about 33%. Likewise, if it is counting comets as boons, the numbers would be a little more than 50% (since three sides would be a boon, and there's also the possibility of getting 1 or more righteous successes followed by a boon). It's not counting comets as boons, then we should expect to see a little more than 33% chance of boon odds Put in 1 yellow die, and it says: "Chance of 1 or more successes: 0.5000" "Chance of 1 or more boons: 0.5833" Clearly, every time you get a comet, it counts them as both a success AND a boon. So my 5% estimate is indeed about as accurate as I imagined it to be. This suggests that the probability generator will frequently over-estimate the power of a yellow die, and over-estimate the success and boon rate of any roll that uses a yellow die. I also noticed another weird mathematical anomaly to the probability tool and yellow dice: It over-estimates the ability of a single yellow die to score 3 or more successes. To do so, the expertise die would need to roll a righteous success (1 in 6) followed by a righteous success (1 in 6) followed by either a success, a comet, or another righteous success (3 in 6). 1/6 * 1/6 * 3/6 = 3/216, about a 1.38% chance. The probability tool instead lists it at 2.78%, about double what it should be. All the other numbers for a single die of any type appear to be correct, not sure why it's got this one wrong. From these two errors with the yellow die, we can conclude that the odds of scoring the really high damage results on troll-feller strike are actually much lower than what my initial analysis (or your reply) suggested.

gruntl said: You left out the mean crit numbers per hit. Reckless use of Trollfeller strike will give you 0.33 from card effects (without comets), while the conservative side will give you 0 crits. Do you mean that crits are useless as a result, you seem to be only interested in pure wounds? If you feel that way I suggest treating all crits as they are treated for henchmen (adding wounds equal to rating). In any case, getting many crits is one of the strong points of Reckless stance, so it should be included if you try and compare stances. My disregarding of the effects of crits was based both on my own experiences with the game and with numerous threads on these forums about crits. A significant portion of the crit cards are meaningless for the NPCs, even if devastating to the PCs. Giving a black die on Fellowship to a Beastman is pretty irrelevant. Yes, I could add a house rule like you propose, and if it was in effect, it would change the very math we're talking about. With that rule in play, the red dice would indeed be much more appealing. gruntl said: - You say that only 5% of attacks will let you use the comet line to full effect. However, you miss adding anything for the 14% when this doesn't happen. These 14% will make the miss rate go down or boon effect chances go up, or just add another crit. Sure, this will have an effect also on the conservative side results. There's no need to add something else in for the other 14% because all the results of the yellow dice were actually already figured in to the base probability charts. Rather than adding something to the red results for those 14%, the more accurate representation would be to subtract one success or one boon from the 5% of results where the comet effect was invoked. Technically, if you were using that benefit and getting the extra 0.25 average damage from the severity, then you'd be missing out on some other benefit, such as getting to ignore armour soak. gruntl said: - The variance is not at all the same for the two sides. In fact, the distribution functions for damage is not even symmetric around the mean. Their shapes are also different between the stances. The red side has a much larger variance (e.g., you can never get 17+ damage out from the green side, which happens 16% of the time in red stance). The mean output is just not a very meaningful measure for reckless stance (reckless is all about taking chances). Absolutely the variance is different. However, in RPG combat, high variance almost always favors the underdogs. The little kobold that's on stage for one or two attacks and is woefully outgunned by the Heroes benefits much more from high variance than a PC does. Now, I will admit that the Warhammer setting has the PCs as the underdogs more often than any game I've played other than Call of Cthulhu. But I still bet that at the start of most fights, the expectation is that most of the PCs will survive. The benefits the PCs reap from one lucky roll are almost always less than what they suffer from 1 bad roll. EDIT: I figured out your math. Ignore my question (which I've deleted) about the 16%.

I use lots of black dice. (And lots of white dice, for that matter.) Give them out for all sorts of things, per the suggestions in the rules. I really like the way a white and a black don't automatically cancel, they just increase the odds of getting a more extreme roll. It's one of my favorite things about the system. I've had ranges add to shot difficulty, much as you proposed, but never codified or locked in specific modifiers with lasting precedents. I just wing it as the rules suggest, and it's never been a problem. One way that I differ from what you're proposing is that I've never given penalty dice for taking multiple manoeuvres, I generally figure the fatigue build-up will be punishing enough eventually. I just let them look like big **** heroes for a round or two before making them pass out. One of my players once had a lot of fun making the others carrying him around after he over-performed at the start of a big scene. On a related note, I feel like the dice collection I've got has more purple than it needs, but not enough black. So, if need be, I convert them, handing out an extra purple instead of 3 black, or two extra purples instead of 5 black (this is rare). For the terms of impact on your ability to succeed or fail, 1 purple is almost exactly equal to 2 black. For terms of the impact on your boon or bane results, 1 purple is roughly equal to 3 black. It would be more like 3 black in this regards if the purple die didn't have a chaos star on it. The chaos star can make it much worse for some actions (and locations), and not quite so bad on others.

Nisses said: keltheos said: Turn the book over? (come on, it had to be said!) it really did Unless he meant the GM screen is printed upside down. If so, instead of the artwork reinforcing the tone and theme, it will only make the players giggle. That would be worth complaining to customer service about.

gruntl said: r_b_bergstrom said: I've run some pretty serious number-crunches on it, and come to the conclusion that if the Red and Green sides of the cards were identical, the Red dice would almost never be worth it. That's why the red sides of cards tend to look better than green, because you'll pay for all those goodies with more banes. Vegas casinos would love those red dice and cards, because they look so much sexier to the players than they actually are. But that's the entire point. The red side is better on almost all offensive cards (and the offensive cards that are better at the greens side are invariably worse than the best redside cards, compare, e.g. Rapid Shot to Accurate shot). It's not only about what dice results you can get, but also what those results will get you. I disagree. As I said, the red side almost always looks much better, but often isn't any better, or is only marginally better. I've run some numbers to see if this would make my point more clearly about red vs green. Let's look at Troll-Feller Strike. I chose it partly at random (it was in the first Player Character box I opened) and partly because the math on it was reasonably easy for me to figure out. It's not one of the absolute best cards, but it's pretty darned good. It's a solid tier-2 card, and the tier-1 above it is comprised of only about 3 cards, 2 of which have seen errata. I imagine you could easily argue that Troll-Feller Strike is in a 12-way tie for 4th best non-magic attack card. It certainly doesn't suck. Looking at the card, one's initial instincts are that this card is much better on the red side than the green side. The red side has that juicy double-boon line and the very respectable comet line, both of which are absent from the green side. What's more, the green side adds an extra black die of difficulty to your roll. First impressions are that this card is much better on red than green. In theory, you could roll a hit for + 7 damage, +2 criticals, and a number of bonus wounds based on the severity of one those criticals. While that's not gonna happen very often, it's still clear that the red side does tons more damage than the green! Except it doesn't. After running the math, I've concluded that on average it does 0.2 damage more per attack. Average damage for the red side is 12.8725 minus target's toughness. Average damage for the green side is 12.66 minus the target's toughness. You can plug different variables into it, but unless you're looking at very high-level characters, the basic dynamic does not alter. For those interested in verifying or rebuking my claim, I'll now detail how I arrived at those figures. Those who have a dislike for math probably won't find much of interest in the rest of my post and should feel free to skip it. I used the attack pool from the Original Post in this thread. 1 purple, 3 blue, 2 stance, 1 yellow. In my experience, most attack pools also have at least one white and at least one black die, but since they kinda come close to cancelling each other out (and the math is much simpler without them), I figured we'd leave the white and black out and just stick with his original dice. I ran the numbers through the online probability tool at http://www.jaj22.org.uk/wfrp/diceprob.html, as that saved me a lot of time and effort, though it meant I don't have numbers for odds of rolling 4 or more successes, or similarly large numbers of boons and banes. I rounded those results to the nearest percentage point and made little results charts. Given those numbers, the red side has the following Hit or Miss percentages: 10%: Miss 35%: Hit +1 damage 55%: Hit +3 damage The red side has the following boon or bane odds: 1%: 2 Fatigue from Banes* 16%: 1 Fatigue from Banes* 21%: 0 boons or banes 25%: If it hits, gets +1 damage, ignore armour soak 19%: If it hits, gets +3 damage, +1 critical. 18%: If it hits, gets +4 damage, +1 critical, ignore armour soak To determine the overall damage odds, I multiplied those two percentages. These are rough numbers, for several reasons. (The accurate math is actually more complicated because some results are less likely to occur concurrently. With the red dice, you get slightly more banes on rolls that have fewer successes, and some sides have more than one symbol so you get more extreme rolls. I played around with that for a little bit, and decided the numbers weren't different enough to justify the extra effort. This is part of why I rounded them to the nearest percentage point for the charts here, as the long flowing digits aren't any more accurate than the shorter numbers that are easier to read.) This multiplication came up with the following percentages for the damage results of any given roll. 10%: Miss 13%: Damage N+1 21% Damage N+3 9%: Damage N+2 (+ignore soak) 7%: Damage N+4 (+1 crit) 6%: Damage N+5 (+1 crit, ignore soak) 14%: Damage N+4 (+ignore soak) 10%: Damage N+6 (+1 crit) 10%: Damage N+7 (+1 crit, ignore soak) If we assume that N=10 (Strength 5 + Hand Weapon), and that the ability to ignore armour soak adds on average 2 points of damage to the total**, then this generates an average damage per attack roll of 12.86. Of course, that doesn't take the comet line into account. The comet line turns one point of damage into a crit, and then adds bonus wounds equal to the severity of that crit. Crit severity will vary wildly depending on what cards have been handed out already as wounds, and which expansions you have. I did a number crunch on my deck and found the average is 2.25 damage. This assumes a fresh deck and no pre-existing “flesh wound” crits on the foe. (If they have a single pre-existing "fleshwound" crit, it rises to 2.34, in case anyone cares) The next step was to calculate what percentage of hits can actually find the comet effect useful. Obviously, you don't want to use the comet line if you didn't net any other successes, or if it could be used as a boon to do +1 damage AND cancel a couple points of armour soak. So, this is only going to be an additional boost in the situations where your roll shows 2 or more potential successes, AND you also already have 1 or more banes or 3 or more eagles as your final boon/bane result from all the other dice but the yellow one, AND you roll a comet. You have a roughly 19% chance of rolling a comet (17% from your initial roll of a yellow die, plus 2% from rolls that get one or more Righteous Successes before rolling the comet), a 76% chance of scoring 2+ successes, and 35% (17% + 18%) chance of scoring banes or 3+ boons. So at best, the comet line is a smart move on 5% of all rolls (as .19 * .76 * .35 = .05054). So, on 5% of all rolls, we add .26 damage, meaning we add an average of 0.125 damage per attack roll. The end result being that we do an average damage on the red side of 12.8725 minus the target's toughness. Now let's look at the green side. Same process (except we can skip the obnoxious part about the comet, since there's no comet line on the green side). Green Side: Hit vs Miss Odds: 11%: Miss 40%: Hit +1 damage 49%: Hit +3 damage Boon and Bane Odds: 0%*: 2 Fatigue 10%: 1 Fatigue 19%: 0 boons or banes 71%: If it hits, gets +1 damage, ignore armour soak Overall damage odds: 11%: Miss 12%: Damage N+1 14% Damage N+3 28%: Damage N+2 (+ignore armour soak) 35%: Damage N+4 (+ignore armour soak) Assuming the same value for N (10) and for armour soak (2) as we did for the red side, this results in an average damage of 12.66 minus the target's toughness. The red side does 12.8725, just 0.2125 damage per hit more than the green. As I indicated, most of the above numbers were rough, and there could be rounding errors that I've missed. But the margin of error on my numbers is likely to be smaller than the margin of damage bonus that the red side of the card has. Whenever there was doubt (such as the comet effect), I chose for the numerical result that gives the larger boost to the red side, yet it still only got ahead of the green by 2 tenths of a point of damage. The upshot of all this is that the two sides of the cards are deceiving. The red side often looks much better, when it's actually just minimally better or just breaking even. This all has to do with the extra banes on the red dice, which make you much less likely to score beneficial boon lines. For a card like Accurate Shot, where the green actually looks better than the red, I say with confidence that the red side is actually quite horrible and the gap between them is huge. Notes: *: In addition, there's a 36% chance of getting a fatigue from the red dice's exertion symbols, which happens almost independently of the boon-bane status of the rest of the roll. Overall, the roll has a 47% chance of generating 1 or more fatigue, with a maximum fatigue gain of 3 points per roll. By contrast, the green die only has a 10% chance of getting fatigue at all, and a less-than two-tenths of a percent chance of getting 2 fatigue (and no chance at all of getting a third). Given that every roll of the green pool has a 48% chance of recovering a fatigue, they can pretty much ignore their fatigue status. 36% of green rolls will end up adding 2 extra recharge tokens to an action or dropping the parties best iniative token down by two. Just how bad that is compared to the red sides fatigue has a lot to do with the tactical situation and the character build, not to mention just how cruel the GM is feeling at the moment. **: I chose to equate “ignore your target's armour soak value for this attack” with +2 damage as 2 is approximately the average soak of foes in the Tome of Adventure. One could argue that this is below average for the sorts of foes you'd use Troll-Feller Strike against. However, since the green dice has very reliable odds of getting the single-boon trigger to ignore the soak, if we assume soak is higher it just makes things worse for the red side. If armour soak is 3, then the red side does an average damage of 13.42 and the green side does 13.29, closing the gap by nearly half. Conversely, the red side fairs a tiny bit better against low-armour foes. The red side would do 12.47 damage vs the green sides 12.03 if the armour soak were just 1 instead of 2. The higher the foes armour soak, the better the green side of the card does.The lower their armour, the better the red side does.

Doc, the Weasel said: r_b_bergstrom said: I'll grant you that the potency of delay icons is totally in the hands of the GM. If you game with a GM who feels his or her job is to kill or punish characters, they'll be much nastier than if you play with a GM who feels their job is to facilitate a good story or encourage maximum fun. As if those two things are mutually exclusive. I did not mean to imply they are mutually exclusive. Certainly, challenging your players is a frequent component of telling a good story and making sure everyone has fun. But I don't buy that the GM should always choose to utilize the most brutal option for the Delay Icons, as some (not necessarily you) seem to advocate. I see two reasons not to always go for the throat: 1) Pacing. If the battle's winding down, or is inconsequential to the plot, or the drunken goblin sentries got stupidly lucky and are now one attack roll away from a campaign-ending TPK that was never intended, then I usually won't pick the nastiest option for the player. If you constantly beat down your hardest, how can the players tell when you're building to climax? 2) Concept. The green dice / stance pieces are called "Conservative" because conceptually they represent the character being cautious and taking fewer risks. If they're trying to play it safe both in- and out- of-character, why should the GM look for the worst possible outcome he can hit them with. There are times where that's reasonable, if the PCs have made a horrible mistake, if they're facing the Big Bad, or if the situation is already dire for other dramatic or logical reasons. In general, though, if they're trying to minimize risk they should be allowed to do so. Always choosing to make the delay hurt them as much as mechanically possible seems to run contrary to what the stance represents. (Not that I'm saying that's what you advocated. For all I know, you were just making a joke in your reply, and the lack of smiley confused me. You may feel, like I do, that sometimes it's appropriate to throw everything you've got at the PCs, and sometimes it's less so.)

I like this idea a lot. Perhaps Fatigue could suck Aggression, and Stress could suck Cunning? Specifically I like that it makes stress & fatigue have meaning distinct from wounds, without requiring we track yet another stat on bad guys. (Not that WFRP puts a lot of stats on each baddie, but I like that this house-rule doesn't complicate them.) Any idea how you'd deal with NPC actions and rolls that eliminate stress or fatigue? For NPCs that use PC action cards, or for NPCs that roll 2 Boons. Haven't contemplated the math enough to see if that will break down if you just give them A/C/E for it. Could be a problem if the GM does what's tactically sound instead of what's thematically in-character. If Orks start using "Assess the Situation" then we've probably broken something. Another potential problem that springs to mind is that it might be the nail in the coffin on Dramatic Flourish . I'm not too worried though because I suspect the contested roll portion of that card already did it in. I'm thinking the single largest problem is that if the PCs have a lot of fatigue-causing actions, it could make the NPCs even more cookie-cutter-ish. The A/C/E that distinguishes them would fade away quickly. Not a huge deal, but annoying.