Diego found a game bug! Or not, but definitely something exploitable:
Salik, the Hound takes the Detached special ability (-1d to an action roll to clear 1 stress). Now he can test an untrained action with only 1 die (instead of taking the worst) + clear 1 stress! Ultracombo!
#theMalkavs
That doesn’t sound right. I’d make them roll three dice and take the the worst.
How are you figuring this? The rules say if you ever have to roll zero or negative dice, you instead roll 2 and take the worst. 0 (untrained action) – 1 (Detached) = -1 (total dice), you have to roll negative dice, so you roll 2 and keep the lower. You don’t apply the -1d to the “roll 2 and keep lowest.”
Best case you’re clearing stress and no worse off than you would be normally, but you’re still one bonus die “in the hole” if you want to get out of the penalty dice zone.
If I was running the game and it came up, I’d reply that there are no dice left to reduce; we are already in territory with no dice, and in that case, it is 2d6 keep the lowest. You have to have a die to reduce a die. Because it is not about physical dice, but die codes.
Well that depends on when you subtract the dice.
Rule says that if you have 0 or less die you roll 2 and take worst, right? Now, when do you apply the Detached -1d? If you do it after, then it is as I say, if you do it before, as Travis Stout says. Yours seem as the correct interpretation, maybe a clarification on the full game?
Well, page 6 of the quick start says you can have a negative dice pool, so you should still be able to use Detached with a 0-dot action, it’s just that you’re at -1d effectively, so you’d need two bonus dice to get you up to 1d rather than “roll twice, keep lowest.”
Seems pretty obvious that you figure your entire dice pool in one go; there’s no “order of operations” weirdness for Detached any more than there is for the -1d penalty for facing veteran opponents or suffering a lasting effect.
I agree with you, but now I feel the need for an structure when building a dice pool, first what you got, next the – – then the ++.
A great thing about RPGs is that in cases when the rules are ambiguous there are human authorities to nix obviously bad interpretations.
Yeah, that seems pretty clearly not how it would work. For me, it’s a toss up whether I’d rule that you’d roll an extra die and use the worst, or that you just couldn’t use Detached unless you’ve actually got multiple (good) dice to start with.
Assuming that detached is applied before and not after the roll it would leave the hound to roll two dice and take the worst if he’d normally only got 1d from a taken but not as good ability,..
Travis has it right.