Difficulty Dice / Random Difficulties

[Red 331]

With the new FFG narrative dice mechanic http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=3976, I've been reminded of the optional "Random Difficulties" rule on Page 76 of the 2nd Ed. R&E Rulebook.

I'm curious as to how often people use this optional rule to determine difficulties? Do people use different colored dice for these? It seems that doing so would be very similar to using the difficulty, challenge, and setback dice used in the FFG system.

[cheshire]

I totally had forgotten about that rule. I had to go and look it up just to remind myself what you were talking about.

For me personally I just decide on how difficult the task is in relationship to the chart, and so long as they hit a number somewhere in that difficulty range, I usually call it good. Seldom to I say, "You have to hit exactly a 13." Sometimes if I think a 16 is too low I may say "That's on the harder end of Difficult" if I think they should have to hit closer to 20.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[DougRed4]

I'll have to take a look at that, too (as I didn't recall it).

I pick the Difficulty Level (say, Moderate), then I base how low or high it is based on where we're at in the campaign. We've been playing for a bit over a year so far, so I've been using the lowest number on the chart from that column. So if the range is 11-15, I go with 11 for both the bad guys and the good guys.

Very soon (after this pivotal battle with a Dark Jedi), which will be for us the end of "Episode 2", I'll ramp things up a bit, so now in that same range they'll have to (usually) hit a 12.

That way, way down the road, perhaps as the campaign winds to a close, things will be even more difficult, and eventually the numbers to hit will be the high end of the range.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[garhkal]

If they don't ask to know the diff, and i care not, i sometimes randomize it, but a lot of times i do tell them at least where it sits (its midline moderate, or top end difficult etc).
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Red 331]

I'm glad to hear I wasn't the only one who'd kind of forgotten about this optional difficulty mechanic. One of the things I like about the FFG narrative system is the ability to attribute the cause of either failure/success or related advantages/disadvantages to a specific cause. For example, if a setback die roll in the FFG system associated with heavy rain caused a failed roll, you know that you can "blame it on the rain" in essence (sorry, now I'll be singing that song for a while). In d6, if you have multiple modifiers adding to the difficulty, your single roll doesn't identify which of those modifiers caused the failure/success or other complications/advantages, since the modifiers are just all summed up.

At the same time I think it's also part of the weakness with the FFG narrative dice system, in that it kind of "forces" these results through a mechanical process, instead of allowing the GM to interpret the results as she/he sees fits the story line best. FFG players - please feel free to disagree with me.

Anyway, this optional d6 rule seems like it could be used to serve a "narrative dice" mechanic of sorts, and that's why I was particularly interested to see if people ever used the rule with different colored dice to tie a difficulty modifier to a particular cause.

[atgxtg]

We rarely use it. For the most part is is just another roll. In fact, we've been considering going the opposite route and eliminating most of the die rolls. For instance having the NPCs always roll average and just letting the PCs roll.

[garhkal]

[Red 331]

I think the wild die would change those odds slightly, Garhkal.

[atgxtg]