Psektos said:

The statement that the gamemaster tells the story is a half truth the other half of the story is told by the players. The more invested the players are in the story the better the game. If the players start engaging in scenes and battles the better the story and therefore the game.

Quoted for truth! As a GM, this you can only achieve with an experienced buch of roleplayers. This hourglass/comet/skull dice can tell a story better than a degree-of-success/failure number, assuming both sides (GM & players) are willing.

It will take longer to resolve these results no matter how profficient you get with them.

Since:
Blue does v
Yellow does w
Purple does x
Red/Green does y
White/Black does z

So your action is:  v + w + x + y + z.....    gah...

The worst question to be asked:  What are my odds of  v + x + z ?

As for time:
I would think it will be something like if it would normally take one round, prehaps the time result means it takes 1 aditional round for eah hourglass or the result wont happen till the end of that round. 

Loswaith said:

That isn't how really how it works. It isn't the case that Blue does one thing and White does another. They all do the same things, but with different percentage chances of different results. When it comes to determining the results you don't need to look at the colour of the dice, just the symbols.

Also, the hourglass may not always mean that the action takes LONGER in the temporal sense.

Notice how the tracking tile piece for the Stance meter is an hourglass. Perhaps, in certain circumstances, rolling an hourglass forces the player to shift his stance either way?

Example: the elf decides to take his time to aim carefully on his next shot. However, whether he misses or not, he gets impatient and anxious as the battle around him gets more tense and closer (he rolls two or three hourglasses)! That means that he has to move his stance meter two or three steps towards Reckless to represent this. His next action may not be quite as calm and collected unless he first takes a quick action to gather his wits together.

I'm pretty sure not all the dice have all the symbols on them. The hour glass doesn't appear on the yellow D6s for example. So although it will be true SOME of the symbols appear on MOST of the dice, there will be some that only appear on one or two.

It won't be the number of variables that will be hard, it will simply be the time take to add them up and figure out what each set of symbols rolled means.

Hellebore

Necrozius said:

This is the sort of thing I don't like, though.  I'll let my player decide if his character is impatient, not the dice.

Steerpike said:

True, but the dice certainly decide the behavior of his character when he fails a Fear test, right?

Regardless, maybe these game effects won't be automatic or immediate. They may require some kind of reaction test.

Like the example of a character being quick and reckless in his sneak attempt. Perhaps, due to the "bad" symbols that appear due to the Reckless dice,  he has to make a Toughness test or he will get tired out from physical duress.

In my example, the PC may have to make a Psychology test to stay cool under pressure.

In other systems, when a PC is surrounded by intense conflict, he has to take a Concentration test to gather his wits together in order to successfully prepare a spell or re-load a gun. Perhaps this will be similar.

I can get behind the idea that the new dice mechanics give players more of a story telling aspect alongside the GM.  I can even dig on the new dice pools to a certain degree.  I have a couple of long time friends/players that love roleplaying and are quite fun to game with; they make good decisions and advance the story on their own merit most times.  However, they are just awful at math and we constantly have to remind them what dice to use in any dice system (it is now just a long standing joke that they throw the dice and cover their eyes and hyperventilate). 

What am I to do then when the one thing they do well is reduced to a table/card cross reference chart and a whole pile of dice that they will stare blankly at?  The thought of translating every single skill or attack for both the NPC side of the game and theirs while they stand by bored out of their gourd seems off-putting to me. 

Additionally this whole system will blow up and grind to a halt if anyone has players that are the 'anti-railroad-zomg-sandbox' crowd.  Sure it is part of the game mechanic and so a rules lawyer just has to suck it, but try telling one of those freedom first guys that his character just felt aprehensive and missed his carefully aimed shot...yeah that'll go over swell.

Not trying to sound all Debbie Downer about this but it looks like no matter how slick and wicked this new system could be that I just won't be able to adopt the new tricks for my crowd of old dogs.  Of course I hope I'm wrong and can laugh at my skepticism in a few months (maybe removing numbers from the die will cause my math challenged friends to be able to do Rain Man calculations in their heads).

Callidon said:

It appears that these "bad" symbols can appear whether the PC succeeds in his action or not.

But really, don't most of us impose these fluff events ANYWAY?

Like, in a lot of games, rolling a "1" means automatic and sometimes devastating failure, with consequences.

Some actions in several games also provoke attacks of "opportunity" or free attacks from the enemy. Like recklessly running PAST a foe, or loading a gun while in melee combat.

Some weapons are unpredictable (ball and chain, gunpowder etc...), and have all kinds of special rules associated with them.

In SOME games, shooting into melee might, if you miss, hit a friend instead of a foe.

Wouldn't these dice effects just replicate the kinds of things we already include anyway?

Necrozius said:

In most examples, rolling is binary: you succeed or you don't. Even with degrees of success, you can barely succeed, or nearly succeed, and so on.  This new mechanic seems to extend the degrees of success idea such that you can now roll a devastating success.  

For instance, perhaps your pistol shot killed the bad guy, but perhaps it also gravely wounded a comrade? If the issue was one of skill, perhaps you shot the comrade in a non-trivial locale, and the shot continued out the other side and buried itself in the enemy's face. If the issue was one of fortune, perhaps the shot exited the enemy you killed, ricocheted off of something and wounded your comrade.  In the old system, you aren't prompted for results like these and so most players and GMs don't include them. Here, the dice explicitly suggest that while you can win, you might do so at a cost, which the players and GMs can narrate. 

It would make sense then that a player could choose NOT to take a stance at all, and just go for regular actions?

Interesting.

Necrozius said:

I like this idea, and I think it's the kind of inspiration you can get from using pools of dice... it does not need to be exactly like that, but it's something that, as a GM, you can decide when seeing the results of the dice.

Still, from what I've seen in the videos, it seems that every card has a list of possible results, so I guess after you see the results in the dice you'll have to "use" the dice to "pay" for the results you want from your action card.

Also, it would be great if an explanation of part of the dice mechanics appears in the designer diaries.

All in all, I am very excited with the ideas I saw in Jay Little's videos and am very glad a new edition of WH is being designed by FFG. I hope it will bring lots of improvements to the game and, sorry for repeating it in half of my messages, I hope they'll publish a lot of scenarios and/or campaigns, as that's what really attracts players to an RPG.

Perhaps a better way to look at it (modifying my previous ramblings) would be that the stance dice could queue the GM off on how to describe the action and to the warp with the cards.  The cards would be great for newer GM's.  Us old farts could juts continue laying on interpretations and descriptions like we always have.  Further, in some situations you could just gloss over the stance dice completely as a flat success or failure and move on so that every tussle with a hobo doesn't turn into a two hour event complete with anime slash lines and bad techno music.  It's hard for me to step back and see the interchangable parts of a new system until I've sat down and spread the books around my house for a couple weeks.  I am less worried though...so on with the show.

Necrozius said:

Yes, but that's a subconscious reaction.  The character fails the fear check and he is overcome by the effect.  When it comes to conscious decisions that should be the province of the GM or player, I don't care for game mechanics that dictate or override the player. To me, that is the single worst aspect of 4e D&D. 

Without knowing more, I can't say whether the mechanics of 3e WFRPG will do this sort of thing.  I was just responding to an example posted, and for all I know the mechanics may not bear the example out.  I'm interested in seeing more about the new edition, but I hope the designers didn't put in mechanics that essentially 'take over' roleplaying by imposing decisions on players or the GM that are best left to the player or GM in the first place.  What I've seen so far doesn't suggest they've done this, but some of the interpretations I've seen on the boards do come across that way.