One of my players pointed out that the Level 1 Harm penalty (reduced effect) seems worse than the Level 2 Harm penalty (-1d). His thinking on it is: the one less die is just a chance of lower result, but reduced effect is always a lower result. Perhaps I misunderstand what I am messing with, but I am inclined to agree, and seriously considering swapping the penalties for Level 1 and 2 Harm. Thoughts?
EDIT: Another thing I am noticing too as I think about this more, is that the loss of a die hurts less and less as dice pools grow in size; unlike the reduced effect.
While I agree that the two penalities are pretty close…
Reduced effect just scale down the effect of your action (from Great to Standard to Limited) and it doesn’t bring more failure to your action.
-1d affects your chance of failure, your chance of getting a compromised success (including a reduced effect) and in general makes everything more “risky”.
Yeah, you can still have reduced effect but no extra complications if you roll well. Having one less die can hamper your efforts both in consequence and potential failure. You can always compensate for your (known) reduced effect, but the vagaries of the dice with a deeper wound are far more dangerous in my opinion.
Well, with reduced effect, a success with limited effect becomes no effect. Etc. It also means a greater effect result (crit) is not possible since it gets downgraded to moderate effect.
Whereas 1 less die means it is just more likely to roll a lesser result, but does not necessarily exclude results (it could, but only at 2 or less dice).
Nathan Roberts I do see some weight added from that argument. It’s just less likely to come up though than a guaranteed lessened effect. I so far remain unconvinced
EDIT: Another thing I am noticing too as I think about this more, is that the loss of a die hurts less and less as dice pools grow in size. IE: There is more bite in the level 2 harm when a character starts out, but I think that goes away as training increases. And the bite of reduced effect remains the same regardless of the character’s action training.
It’s my understanding that all effects, both positive and negative, have less impact as the die pool gets higher. The difference in chance of success between 2 dice and 3 is much more than the difference when going from 3 to 4. It works the other way as well.
We can talk about what’s statistically worse all we want (and really that’s going to come down to individual DMs and how they use effect), but psychologically it hurts more to lose a die.
Well, it’s clear now that which is worse is situational. If you’ve got 4 dots in Skirmish and are making an action where effect is limited anyway, reduced effect is certainly more irritating than -1d, but in most situations -1d should be worse than reduced effect due to increased chance of negative results.
It’s a limitation of the rules, as far as I can tell. If you want to make a special exception when it makes sense, I wouldn’t see too much issue with that. But if the rules said “switch out the level 1 and 2 harm whenever” it would introduce unnecessary complexity to the rules. In general, it makes sense for harm to work the way it does.
One thing we’ve experienced is that asking the GM for increased effect, is nearly always doable either by way of Devil’s Bargain or by making the action less controlled (effectively going all out). So if Reduced Effect is a serious hamper, there are lots of ways for a scoundrel to push themselves to do more.
Another way you can balance the scales in your game is to reduce the scope of a level 1 harm. Consider that these penalties only apply to situations the harm effects. It’s entirely possible to make level 1 harm more specific than level 2 harm so it has a smaller area of effect.
The big difference I see though is that level 1 harm just goes away when you recover, which is huge in terms of how many downtime actions you end up spending!
Yep, what Sean said. Level 1 and level 2 harm are both meant to be annoying. Level 1 is “lighter” because it’s easier to recover.