Miniatures skirmish dungeon exploration. With papercraft! · By
Checking the rules for rolls, they changed from those in edition 1, right? Reading the new rules, it seems to me that most of the rolls will either be critical success or critical failure (most of the time there will only be a single die with the top value), as rules dont specify that the top is from each side, and instead it seems that its the top comes from all dice. That means that it would only be a normal success or normal failure if there is a tie. Did I interpreted the rules correctly?
Hmm. I might need to go look at how I described things, but no, crits should still be rare as the system should be largely unchanged from 1e.
My intent was that you still take the top value across all dice, just as in 1e, so crits would only happen if one side rolls doubles that are higher than both the other side’s dice. If that’s not clear, or if a strict reading of the rules doesn’t support that, I might need to tweak the 2e explanation. I’ll try to take a look at that today.
Thanks for asking. It’s difficult to detect points of confusion in the rules when you’re the one who wrote it!
Thanks! This is what I understood from reading the 2e rules, putting some emphasis on the similarities and differences among editions, in case it may help to detect if clarification is needed:
1) both 1e and 2e: choose the dice to roll
2) both 1e and 2e: roll all 4 dice
3) bothe 1e and 2e: apply abilities to reroll or modify a dice
4) both 1e and 2e: detect which one has the top value among all of them (2e doesnt say if its the top value on each side, i.e. the top of the active dice and the top of the opposing), so I am interpreting that its the top value of all 4 dice, which most likely will be a single die unless there is a tie on both sides. Only in 1e: you can figure out the consequences right here.
5) only in 2e, described in the "First" step: remove the dice that are not the top value, so of there is only a single top value on one of the sides (as most of the times will happen), you would remove any of the other dice so then most of the times the other side will end up with no dice, and therefore a critical (according to the next 2 bulletpoints after the "First" step .
6) both 1e and 2e: If there is a tie, remove the dice not in the tie, and reroll the tied dice. Only in 1e: if the tie is in dice from a single side, thats a critical success for that side.
7) calculate the margin
If the intent is to keep the same mechanic as 1e, I think what happened is that the explanation of the ties from 1e was put in 2e as the "determine the result", so 2e may be missing the explanation for the no-ties normal roll... Check that the "Ties section" in 1e match exactly with "Determine the result" of 2e, therefor leaving 2e with no further for the ties than rerolling.
Okay, I see where the confusion is.
Your point #5 is not what I intended for the rules. The intent is that you only remove dice if two or more dice show the same top value. You don't just remove all dice that aren't the top value – you only do it if there's a "tie". The rule says:
First, if two or more dice show the “top value”, remove all dice that do not show that value.
In other words, if there is a tie for the highest value (across all four dice), then you eliminate anything that wasn't part of that tie. If there was only one die with the highest value (which will fairly often be the case), you don't remove anything.
Sorry for the confusion! That rule as written might be a little too terse, making it easy to miss the nuance there, so I'm going to add some clarifying language to that section in the rules and release a new version soon that might help me convey the rule better for future players.
Thanks for taking the time to talk about this with me – if you got caught by my description of the rules, it's pretty likely others have, too, but never spoke up about it, so I appreciate it. This will help me clarify the rules not just for you but for other players as well!
