Re: [ORE] [WT] Character help!

While hard and wiggle dice mean that you succeed, their use can limit how well you succeed. Wiggle dice are 4 times as expensive as regular dice. This has some important ramifications.

The number of dice in your pool determines the capacity of your power. Let's look at a character with 8d compared to a character with 2wd. They both cost the same. The guy with 8d will usually succeed. The guy with 2wd will always succeed (except when penalties are assessed) and can choose his level of success. But, the 2wd character will always only have a width of 2. A guy with 8d will sometimes have a width of 3, maybe even 4.

More importantly, the number of dice in the pool determine the upper range of a character's abilities. How fast you can move or how much you can lift is determined by the number of dice in the pool. That guy with 2wd in flight will always succeed, but he's going to be way slower than the guy with 8d. In a flying dash, the guy with 8d may have trouble getting into the air to begin with while the other guy is flying right from the start, but once the first guy gets airborne a lot faster than the guy with 2wd. How much faster? How about 5 miles an hour versus over 300 miles an hour?

Then there are the multiple actions rules. You get to do one thing for free. If you want to do the same thing twice in a round, you drop one die and look for two sets. That's not possible for the guy with 2wd. He'd be far better off taking 4d+1wd, as he will at least have a chance of making two successes (he'd be rolling 3d, looking for a matching set, and then matching his wd to whatever is left over, but at least it is possible). The 8d character has a better chance of rolling two successes (as his pool would be 7d).

If the character wants to to do two different things at once, he drops 1d as a penalty but then he rolls the smallest dice pool. If you have 8d in Climb Walls and 4d+1wd in Martial Arts Attack, and you want to do the Neo from the Matrix thing of running up a wall and kicking a guard in one attack, you'll have to drop 1d from your 4d+1wd pool and hope for two successes on your 3d+1wd roll. Again, you might be better off taking both pools at 8d.

Hard dice look like they're a bargain in this respect. They always roll 10 and they are only twice the price of regular dice. The problem is that you can never choose to "tone down" your use of hard dice. You have to roll all of them. And you can't take a regular die to soak up a multiple action, as the hard dice are lost first. (Okay, you can add 1 regular die to 4hd, but you'll lose one of the hard dice and you'd only have a 10% chance that the regular die would roll a 10 and match the three hard dice).

4hd looks better on paper than 2wd, but you still can't do two actions and you can never choose to ramp down your attack. Want to shoot the gun out of someone's hand? You can't. When firing a gun you're always in such a rage that you always try for the kill shot.

Hard dice are for powers you don't ever want to fail (like a shield, or armour) or for Hulk-like attacks. If your GM doesn't like them, there are other dice you can use instead, such as expert dice, where you can set them to any number, but you can't set two or more expert dice in the pool to the same number.

The other aspect of Wild Talents (and, even more so, Godlike) that goes hand-in-hand with the hard and wiggle dice is the use of Willpower. The game plays best with Willpower. It doesn't matter if wiggle dice always succeed if you are out of Willpower. Depending on the flaws used, hard and wiggle dice eat through Willpower much more quickly than regular dice. In the case of Godlike, wiggle and hard dice don't allow you to roll dice, so you can't roll a natural 10 to gain 1 Will point (a rule that can also be used in Wild Talents).
 

There's a tendency for players to go through the extras and say, "How do I fit this into my power". That's when Augment and Variable Effect most often leave players scratching their heads.

Instead, those two extras are there to answer the question, "This is what I want my power to do, but how do I do that?" They aren't like other extras, where you can go down the list and pick and choose to beef up any old power. They are there to make certain types of powers possible within the rules. Variable Effect and Augment won't be used very often, but when they are you'll be glad they are there.

Variable Effect is for building a single power that can be used in many different ways. Variable Effect is not something you'd likely add to, say, flying. But it's a great extra if your power is sorcery. If you want to build a Doctor Strange character, Variable Effect is your friend. Create one all-encompassing power and use Variable Effect to make it do different things. Sometimes you use it to fly, other times you use it to attack, and another time you use it to pick a lock, or to read someone's mind.

Augment is similar. You have a dice pool you can add to other powers or dice rolls (for example, skills, or other powers). It's for powers that boost other dice pools.

You can build characters for years and never once use Variable Effect or Augment. You could build Dr. Strange without Variable Effect simply by defining all of his abilities as separate powers. These extras are there because some builds are easier or more efficient when using them, and they can be more fun to play because the abilities aren't limited at character creation.