[Agon] Under Consideration: Helping dice that really help

[GreatWolf]

Crystal was afraid that you'd bring up her die rolling....

Anyways, I like this idea enough to give it a whirl.  Honestly, I'd even be interested in seeing it tried out without any other rules adjustments.  Knowing for sure that I'd get some benefit from a Helping or Creative die makes me much more willing to use them and to tap Oaths to draw them from other players.

[iago]

I've got a lot of crazy this week -- other folks will need to test this one in the lab, I'm afraid. :)

[Darren Hill]

I think this also gets added to 2): the extra dice or rerolls gained from Divine Favour.

One thing:
when using the Divine Favour Extra Attack, you normally roll in the extra dice you've bought as a freebie.
It occurs to me that this isn't straightforward.

The way that should work, probably, is just roll that big pool of dice and look for the highest - don't treat them as helping dice.

Example: I attack with my D10 Spear, D8 Weapon, and D6 Name. My result is 5. I then spend a Divine Favour for a D6, and improve it to 6. I then call in an Oath and get a D8 - this rolls a 1, but my roll is now 7.

I then spend 2 Divine Favour for a follow up attack, so I roll D10, 2D8, and 2d6, looking for the highest.
Then, if I choose, I can call in some more Helping dice - and only these dice then get the minimum +1 effect.

This isn't complicated at all, if you are doing what the book says: when you roll a helping die, pick up that die and roll it into your pool. So you should have in front of you exactly the amount of dice you've just rolled.

The other simple way would be to drop the rule of keeping the bonus dice bought on earlier rolls, it's a lot simpler. But I'm easy either way, or is there a third solution?

[Valamir]

Good catch on the Divine Favor Dice.

So far the only thing I recall Divine Favor being used for in our game is Opening dice, so I have no direct experience with that.

But various commentary seems to indicate that the reroll all of your dice as part of the second go is pretty overwhelmingly good...so maybe, with this rule, the second attack should go back to base dice and start over?

If not, then definitely just treating those dice as "normal" dice and not helping dice is easier.

[Shreyas Sampat]

To be clear what we're looking at is:
1) Name dice, Antagonist Assigned Free Ability Die, Weapons Dice rolled and read as normal.
2) Creative Ability dice, Advantage Dice, Helping Dice (for or from Oaths) provide a +1 each if they are not otherwise used as the "Result" die.

More concisely:
2 includes all dice that are impaired by rolling them.

[Darren Hill]

That definition doesn't include the Divine Favour-granted dice or rerolls.

Mybe this works:
2) All Bonus Dice,
where bonus dice are all those added to whatever the dice set is for a roll.

[Darren Hill]

Hey, John.
When we try the rule, should we try that Advantage Die rule, too (they are Impaired with each use, and don't refresh)?

I've confirmed with my players that we'll be playing this for the next two Mondays.

[John Harper]

Yeah. Do the impairment thing, too. Thanks, man.

[Darren Hill]

Another thought has occurred to me:
Should the "minimum benefit +1" be a Heroes only thing, a special benefit to showcase the heroic nature of the PCs? (This may be what you intended, if so I've written a lot for no reason!)

The problem I'm about to illustrate applies in all the rules changes suggested in this thread - in fact, it might be a little bit worse in the ones which allow bigger bonuses than +1.

I'm also operating under the assumption that NPCs do get to use Creative Abilities, which may be wrong. The text refers to "you" and "heroes," so there's room to interpret it either way.

But if NPCs can use Creative Abilities, that means they have a boat load of extra potential +1's to use during a battle which will make a different to the duration of that fight, quite possibly pushing it to a longer duration than is interesting.

I know in the battles I've been running NPCs in, there's been quite a few situations (usually several in every battle) where an extra +1 or +2 would turn a hit into a miss, or vice-versa, but bonus dice weren't able to change the result because of several reasons:

• either it was later in the fight, and injuries made the reroll dice unable to reach the target,
• or it was late in the fight and the NPC had used it's d8 and higher abilities and so could not reach the necessray range any more,
• or it was any time in the fight and the result was just outside of the GMs reach,
• or a reroll was made and it just wasn't good enough.

In all of those cases a guaranteed +1 (or +2 from chaining two abilities - quite reasonable since I often spent two abilities to try) would have made the difference.

Because NPCs only stick around for the one battle, usually, there's no pressure to consider: "will I need this later? Or can I afford to take the extra interludes this will cost me?" So every ability on the sheet that you can think of narrating in usefully, all the way down to d4, can be used.

Since the percieved whiff factor is really to protect player experience of the game, there's no need for NPCs to get this benefit. NPCs already operate differently from PCs in a number of ways, so it's no great stretch, and is probably a better solution than giving GMs advice not to go crazy on using traits.

What do you think?

[Valamir]

Actually Darren, my gut is leaning the other way.  I think having the NPCs (not minions) take advantage of the +1 Helping dice rule is perfectly acceptable...otherwise they'll become fairly impotent.  You'll have Antagonist whiffing instead of player whiffing and heroes will roll over NPCs in short order.

Whiffing isn't about failure...or even the frequency of failure.  Whiffing is about failure, that's totally out of your control.  Nothing you could have done would have had any significant impact on success...its just plain ole luck...that's a whiff.

Giving both sides the ability to get the +1 should work fine, because while the NPCs are now HARDER to defeat (than if they didn't get it) its still well within the player's ability to influence.  Its not bad luck that caused the hero to failure, its that the player decided that winning wasn't worth the amount of Impairment it would take to swing the victory.  Before this rule the player could decide that winning WAS worth the Impairment but the odds were so unlikely that he failed anyway...a whiff.  But WITH this rule, since each step gets you marginally closer you're limited only by the amount of resources you're willing to burn.


Now one caveat I'll throw in here, is that players may need to make their resources last over multiple objectives, where a GM is free to burn all of an NPCs resources in the battle...so an NPC is free to burn far more than a hero.  But since there would typically be more Heroes (and hense more resources) than NPCs I'm thinking that will balance out.  If not, then it might be useful to charge the Antagonist Strife to Impair more than 1 ability per contest...but I'd rather avoid fiddly stuff like that if possible.

[John Harper]

I agree with Ralph.

And to be totally clear: NPCs can use Creative Abilities.

[Darren Hill]

Thanks for clearing up that point, John.

I'm still a bit worried about the NPC's getting +1, and this is why: Under this approach, a default NPC with no abilities raised above d6 now has access to around 32 automatic +1's, a fair proportion of which you'll be able to find a way to narrate in - short of some instruction which says, "don't go crazy with creative abilities," and I think that's a flawed approach because every Antagonist will interpret it differently.

I think the antagonist wiffing isn't likely to be as serious. NPCs would just have to be careful about when they use their D8 and above traits, and most of the time, that sea of d4 and d6 abilities will sit there unused. While PCs have to conserve their resources, NPCs don't - and this effectively simulates that, by making only a small proportion of the NPCs traits available for effective use for such boosting.

There, I've explained my worries. I'm pretty pumped about getting to play again on Monday, and I might have a new monstrosity to add the NPC thread afterwards (one of my players lurks hereabouts, so I don't want to post it yet).

[GreatWolf]

Whiffing isn't about failure...or even the frequency of failure.  Whiffing is about failure, that's totally out of your control.  Nothing you could have done would have had any significant impact on success...its just plain ole luck...that's a whiff.

Giving both sides the ability to get the +1 should work fine, because while the NPCs are now HARDER to defeat (than if they didn't get it) its still well within the player's ability to influence.  Its not bad luck that caused the hero to failure, its that the player decided that winning wasn't worth the amount of Impairment it would take to swing the victory.  Before this rule the player could decide that winning WAS worth the Impairment but the odds were so unlikely that he failed anyway...a whiff.  But WITH this rule, since each step gets you marginally closer you're limited only by the amount of resources you're willing to burn.

I'm going to agree with Ralph here.  (Good thing, too, since we're playing tonight.)  The frustration level at the table last week wasn't about hitting and missing.  It was all about feeling totally powerless to affect what was going on.

But, playtest will tell....

[John Harper]

I totally understand your worries, Darren. But this needs actual play before we can start second guessing it. Speculation only helps so much. Yeah?

[Darren Hill]

Yeah, that's fine.