TG Design Thread: Elegance in Elf Simulation

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Goon Danton: May 24, 2012; Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

I'm not sure of a general plug and chug formula for xd6, but if you have excel I can give you a method.

Make a chart with 1-whatever d6 as the rows, and result numbers 1-(whatever*6) as the columns. For the 1d6 row, put a 1 in each cell from 1-6, since each can be rolled one time. For rows higher than that, each cell is the sum of anything in the previous row that could give you that result if you added another d6. So for 2d6, result of 8, it would be the sum of 1d6, result of 2 through 7. You can copy-paste the cells from 2d6 once you want to expand to more dice.

All that will give you is the number of ways to get that result on that number of d6. To get the probabilities, make a second chart, and have each new value be (old value)/(sum of the whole row).

Not sure if that makes any sense, since I haven't had my coffee and I'm fighting the autocorrect on my phone, but it will get you the full distribution for as many dice as you need if I explained it right.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2012 11:33

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 13:24

Goon Danton: May 24, 2012; Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Are there any particular issues that crop up with dicepool/successes systems that I should know about? I know that the Storyteller system uses them and has problems, but they also didn't do the math apparently.

The basic mechanic I'm thinking of is this: skill determines the number of dice you roll for an action. Your opponent/target gives a static target number for you to meet/beat. So if you have a skill of six and your opponent has a TN of 4, you roll six dice, and any that come up as a 4 or higher count as a success. Then your talents/traits/etc give you things you can spend successes on, like damage or knockdowns or whatever else, resulting in a kind of build-your-own-D&D4-power system.

The idea is that more power results in you being able to do more things with an action, or do the same things but better (by spending multiple successes on one option). It also does a lot to eliminate "dead rounds," since the odds of zero successes are fairly low if you're rolling a decent number of dice.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2012 14:58

Goon Danton: May 24, 2012; Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

lodoubt posted:

This isn't necessary per se but you should really look into L5R. While it does Roll & Keep rather than a success system, it otherwise is rather centred around what you are describing.

As for problems, the only problems in Storyteller really inherent to the core mechanics is the fact that you can't really distinguish between highly damaging weapons and highly accurate ones. But that can be fixed if you have some mechanics that provide autosuccesses provided you had at least one from your original pool etc.

I'd be wary about using it SPECIFICALLY because it eliminates dead rounds though. The odds are much lower but I've still experienced plenty of dead rounds in nWoD. Furthermore it isn't really a big enough issue to choose your core mechanic over.

I do note however that you are suggesting variable TN. The issue with this is that it is *either* mathmathmath or rather reduces the scale for increases to character potency that can happen before the game falls apart entirely.

Those are interesting points. I looked at L5R's system a while back, and it's a really cool way to do it, but my two problems are that it seems to require an attribute/skill split (which I'm trying to avoid, for Reasons), and that anything involving choice (like roll/keep or ORE) is a bit beyond my skills for probability without falling back on Monte Carlo simulations, which I only vaguely remember how to do.

That's definitely a point about weapon differentiation. I'm not sure how to handle it there. I was thinking of going with more general weapons like Old School Hack does, with a lot of differentiation built around what your fighting style lets you spend successes on.

The funny thing about the pool/successes system and math is that since every die is independent of the others, it actually turns out that you can figure out a probability with a single ~~simple~~ three-variable equation. Dice, TN, and number of successes in, probability out, no fuss no muss. It definitely has large jumps in probability when you add a die, though, so I was thinking a lot of the skill granularity will come via what you can spend successes on.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2012 17:57

Goon Danton: May 24, 2012; Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Splicer posted:

How are you doing this so far? I have Advice of Dubious Usefulness but you may be following some or all of it already.

Share it anyway! I also have that goal, but I don't actually know what I'm doing.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2012 15:46

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