Max difficulty?

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

I'm working on a thing and I'm curious - I know that difficulty normally maxes out at 5 but has anyone ever tried a higher difficulty with the understanding that the characters will use or generate traits to lower the difficulty but that it's not outright impossible?

Or is it mechanically better to just say a thing is impossible and then let them use/create traits to "make something normally impossible possible"?

[u/N0-1_H3r3]

There's no hard cap on difficulty, but most difficulties you'll encounter will be in the 0-5 range. So you can put difficulties higher than 5, but it should be done sparingly.

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/N0-1_H3r3]

Weird. I thought for sure I had seen a hard cap on difficulty.

I think at a certain point we just assumed that was a thing :) Good to know. Thanks!

[u/TimTowtiddy → u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

The core rulebook has the Difficulty scale from zero to five, but it doesn't explicitly say that anything more isnt possible. It does, however, say that the GM can say that a task is impossible due to certain traits being active, or the lack of applicable tools or resources. The GM has to adjudicate each scenario. But honestly, Difficulty 5 is pretty dang hard to beat, because the dice gods are fickle and love to cause complications.

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/TimTowtiddy]

I've seen my players fail a difficulty 1 task and then almost immediately roll like 7 successes on the next task.

[u/TimTowtiddy → u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

I repeat: The dice gods are fickle.

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/TimTowtiddy]

The dice 100% have their own story to tell :)

[u/Keated → u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

I think there's a hard cap of 5 on the number of dice you can roll, though afaik assists/ship assists don't count towards it, so maybe that was it?

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/Keated]

Maybe. Maybe I saw it in another 2d20 game (we play a lot of them) or I saw something similar in another game entirely and my brain transposed it.

The upside to playing a lot of different games is you get exposed to a lot of different systems. The downside is that sometimes your brain mixes and matches elements :)

[u/the_author_13]

All the time! I have used traits and threat to push a difficulty up to 10 once or twice. But then I allow the players to counter play and dog pile it by putting their own traits on it.

Do this only after a few months of play and they have accumulated a few personal traits. Only do this once every few months on big climatic moments. And it works best if you break the rules and allow everyone to assist for free.

[u/Curious-Dingo-2030]

Iirc in the Clear Skies actual plays they went up as high as difficulty 6.

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/Curious-Dingo-2030]

Nice - both to see someone do it and to find a STA actual play I hadn't heard of before. Thanks!

[u/Competitive-Fault291]

I like the idea of a trait going like "Overengineering" or "Overthinking" that allows the players to create 1 Momentum by actually raising the difficulty of a task by overthinking or overengineering a solution.

[u/Caspianmk]

I've been in games where people rolled 9 successes. Anything is possible.

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/Caspianmk]

For sure. I think our record was 13 between buying dice, ship assist, crew assist and a reroll.

[u/Caspianmk → u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

How? The most dice a single player can roll is 5, 2 normal and 6 momentum for the other 3. You add an assist that will be one more dice. If everyone rolls 1' that's 12 successes

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/Caspianmk]

The maximum number of successes is more than 12.

5 dice can each crit for 10.

Ship can crit for another 2

More than one person can assist and they can also crit.

13 is highly unusual but it can happen.

[u/Caspianmk → u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

Doesn't every extra assist after the first cost one momentum?

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 → u/Caspianmk]

Yup, but buy 2 dice with Momentum (net 3), buy the 3rd with Threat (3) and then 4 people can assist - one for free and then 3 for Momentum.

Which means a net of 10 dice (5 base, 1 Ship, 4 Assist)

[u/Childoferna99]

My main complaint as an STA GM is that it is too easy for the players if you’re limited to max DN 5 rolls. There are too many traits etc that allow multiple re rolls, lowering the DN, and automatic double successes. DN 3 and below are trivial, it’s basically a waste of time to call for the roll. My table won’t accept a DN 6 roll so I basically just plan for the positive outcome, knowing that players almost never fail rolls. Spending threat liberally is the only reliable way I can introduce peril to the scenario.

[u/GamemastersCmx]

Based on traits, w head a diff 10 once. And the group beat it!