In combat thats most new player weapon skills (2 on average). This whole thread is about the starting character experience, and feeling like you can't pass most of the skills you have due to a high TN really doesn't feel great at the table. In the playtest I did my players just found it kind of depressing and like, though they had options out of combat, in combat they were basically useless. They generally had betters or equal wits as strength, and the enemies were also missing them constantly too.
I had issues with combat as well during my playtests, but not as much with Skills rolls which were successful a good 75% of the times. As I said earlier in this topic, using the Forward Stance in combat is practically mandatory for beginner characters, letting them roll at least 3 dice on each attack, but that's a constraint I do not like much. Characters who are particulary weak and have a high Strength TN suffer a lot in the beginning, so having an entire party of low Strength characters is highly
not recommended. Conversely, enemies should not miss that much as well if the characters use the Forward Stance, but I can see how a game where everyone has Weapon Proficiency rank 2 and despite this constantly fights in Defensive Stance could easily turn into a whiff fest not particularly interesting to play... my advice is to use very weak opponents in the first adventures, adversaries that can be killed in just one or two hits, until most of the player-heroes have at least rank 3 in their main Weapon Proficiency.
The difference here to other systems is that climbing over the garden wall and scaling the black gate will be the exact same target number. Francesco has said that the number is balanced for campaign play, which is fine, but in almost any other game, as you get better at something you take on more difficult challenges. In this case, the system is expecting a session one character to take on a task that has the same difficulty as a character who has been played for 2 years. 90% of players won’t play for the 2 years, so it seems pretty mislead design to balance the game in its entirety to that small minority.
Except that, as Francesco said, you don't roll to climb over the garden wall, and probably not even to climb a tree. You only roll for heroic challenges, and the difficulty of those kind of challenges is written on your character sheet and depends only on your innate abilities and your level of skill. It's an abstraction, but it works. Either you are good at doing something and you attempt it, or you don't (or roll at your own risk). If you want the character to take on more difficult challenges, then you can simply attempt actions with a higher Risk Level, described in the Loremaster's chapter. You may have the same chance of succeeding in an Athletics roll to climb a tall tree and to scale a mountain, but in the first case if you fail you'll only suffer some bruises, in the second you'll probably die from a 100-feet fall. So, as you improve your Athletics Skill, you'll also take on riskier endeavours more confidently, and that's how you really get better. The system is
not expecting a session one character to take on a task that has the same difficulty as a character who has played for 2 years, simply because the latter will have a higher Skill rank, making the task in every respect
easier.
It’s also possible for 5 dice to fail where a single feat die will pass, so if you can’t handle the possibility of a less experienced character showing a veteran up, I’m not sure ttrpgs in general should be your thing?
... what?
That's... really not what I said. Of course the dice can have radically different outcomes regardless of the character's Skill level. What I'm saying is that you can't expect that Hope alone gives you reliable results when you're a total novice. It may help, giving you a better chance, but it cannot turn the tables just like that (and it couln't do so in 1ed, anyway). It's just a matter of perspective. If you have only 1 rank, you are just not good enough: you may try with a barely decent chance of success, but what you should do is just letting someone else in the Company do the task, maybe giving him support (and you can do that, since you have 1 rank).
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.