Post by Grumble Guy on Jan 7, 2007 0:30:00 GMT
Unfortunately, Fenrir has just left. I'm going to do the best that I can to explain this without him...
So I met Fenrir today, and after a while I skimmed over what he has written down. I asked him about the skill/ability system. Here's what I got from what he said/what I read:
Depending on the difficulty of the action there are different challenge ratings (pretty much just like D&D). In order to succeed in that action one needs to roll an appropriate number of successes with D6's.
NOTES:
--The number of D6's one can roll increases/decreases with skills/feats/race.--
--I don't remember if one had to get greater than or equal to the challenge rating in order to succeed--
Everything above is has no major problems, but there's a catch... Fenrir said that rolling three ones in any attempt results in an automatic failure.
At first I thought "What a fun and elegant concept," but in a few seconds my math-mind kicked in and crashed the party.
The problem is that the chance of an automatic failure increases quite rapidly.I started calulating the odds of auto-failure for different numbers of dice, and got up to eight:
NOTES:
--I think that he said that the general range for the number of dice that a person actually would be able to use is something like min-4 max-14
I'm probably going to make a spreadsheet that can do this all much faster and more easily, also probably with different numbers of ones needed for auto-fail. If I do I'll post it on my built-out-of-parts-that-I-found-on-the-side-of-the-road webserver. ;D
We (very) breifly discussed scaling the number of ones needed for an auto-fail to rise with higher challenge rating tasks, then possibly allowing players to choose to roll fewer dice than their maximum in that skill.
We'll have to see how scaling it affects the game, but I forsee that it quite possibly could become sort of... evil. It might end up not "feeling quite right" no matter how we scale it. I've had this happen with a bunch of other things (some of them games), no matter how much I tweaked the numbers I often never quite found a "sweet spot," so to speak.
Not to say that we should scrap the idea, I just want to prepare ourselves for the possibility. If we cling to an idea that simply ends up not working, then it could ruin the game as a whole.
(argh, I need to be more concise!)
Always keep the original conception of the game in your mind (or at least written down), but don't be afraid to move away from it.
(I think that's good enough)
So I met Fenrir today, and after a while I skimmed over what he has written down. I asked him about the skill/ability system. Here's what I got from what he said/what I read:
Depending on the difficulty of the action there are different challenge ratings (pretty much just like D&D). In order to succeed in that action one needs to roll an appropriate number of successes with D6's.
| # on die | # successes |
| 6 | 2 |
| 5-4 | 1 |
| 3-1 | 0 |
NOTES:
--The number of D6's one can roll increases/decreases with skills/feats/race.--
--I don't remember if one had to get greater than or equal to the challenge rating in order to succeed--
Everything above is has no major problems, but there's a catch... Fenrir said that rolling three ones in any attempt results in an automatic failure.
At first I thought "What a fun and elegant concept," but in a few seconds my math-mind kicked in and crashed the party.
The problem is that the chance of an automatic failure increases quite rapidly.I started calulating the odds of auto-failure for different numbers of dice, and got up to eight:
| #of dice | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| approx. chance of auto-failure | 0% | 0% | .5% | 6% | 7% | 10% | 14% | 17% |
NOTES:
--I think that he said that the general range for the number of dice that a person actually would be able to use is something like min-4 max-14
I'm probably going to make a spreadsheet that can do this all much faster and more easily, also probably with different numbers of ones needed for auto-fail. If I do I'll post it on my built-out-of-parts-that-I-found-on-the-side-of-the-road webserver. ;D
We (very) breifly discussed scaling the number of ones needed for an auto-fail to rise with higher challenge rating tasks, then possibly allowing players to choose to roll fewer dice than their maximum in that skill.
We'll have to see how scaling it affects the game, but I forsee that it quite possibly could become sort of... evil. It might end up not "feeling quite right" no matter how we scale it. I've had this happen with a bunch of other things (some of them games), no matter how much I tweaked the numbers I often never quite found a "sweet spot," so to speak.
Not to say that we should scrap the idea, I just want to prepare ourselves for the possibility. If we cling to an idea that simply ends up not working, then it could ruin the game as a whole.
(argh, I need to be more concise!)
Always keep the original conception of the game in your mind (or at least written down), but don't be afraid to move away from it.
(I think that's good enough)
)
