[WoD & Exalted] Currency and Dice Pools
Abkajud:
Hey Callan! ^__^
The Feats of Strength subsystem might be useful to mention, here - at least the one used in Vampire: the Masquerade. If you have a Strength of rating X, you can automatically perform all Feats of Strength rated at X or lower (or maybe X-1 or lower?).
Thus, it could be that you can opt not to roll against a sufficiently weaker opponent, with Willpower points spent in a kind of bidding war. But I'm not sure I get the utility of taking the system in that direction. Just thinkin' out loud!
As for Amber itself, I think you're right about it devolving to GM-fiat; that's my relatively uninformed opinion, though. That's an issue I witnessed in the diceless RPG Nobilis, too - there's no explicit group-consensus mechanic to determine how powerful adversaries are or can be, but I'm not sure what to do about this issue. Since the CA best supported by WoD seems pretty clearly to be Right to Dream, I think the GM should be encouraged to make the case that a given adversary's capabilities make sense entirely within the context of genre/setting expectations.
An Elder vamp should have really high Disciplines, but low Firearms and Drive, for instance. Hm.
Callan S.:
Hullo, Abkajud!
"Makes sense to whom?" Is my usual song and dance at this point. People have very different ideas of what makes sense. I think the notion of 'right' in right to dream was to use a system to determine who it should make sense to. Universalis is an example of that, I think.
I might sound off topic, but in terms of raising to a consciously-manipulated currency, this is kind of the next step. First you notice that hey, you have these numbers where you'd have a consistant result, so you could use that as a whole system instead of the big squiggle of random events it seems! So there's this structure to grasp! Structure, at last! Except it's not there. The GM is so much at liberty to change things, it's as much a structure as a dictator of a country presents (whether he's a good dictator or not doesn't matter - one guy with all the power is one guy telling all the story).
Though I was idling around the idea of a system - it was for a browser game though. The idea is that in a poll format a situation and several actions are described and players can vote for just one. Perhaps actions contributed by players. Okay, polling happens then after, perhaps quite some time after, the player might hit that situation. Okay, he can choose a move now, But he doesn't know which was voted the best move. So that taps into a group imagination, and is fixed, so no one has the capacity to decide which is the best move based on how they'd like things to go (ohh, no one ever does that of course - or - only evil GM's with no skillz do that!)
Okay, now I'm off topic, but atleast I described an idea that revolves around currency ;)
SamuelRiv:
I'm reviewing the Exalted rules, and I'm a bit confused as to your statistics. For Exalted, 7,8,9 count as one success, and 0 counts as two successes, for an expected value of 0.5 for a single die roll. Regardless of this, the probability of success is somewhere less than 50-50. So for three dice rolled, the probability of at least one success is something less than 1 - 1/8, or 87.5%.
You say an "automatic success" for three die is something like 18.5/20, which is 92.5% (closer to a 4-die roll, 93.75%). Am I just being too literal on your math?
By the way, systems with "exploding zeros" would only increase these percentages slightly. (Math problem: can you make a system of exploding zeros where the expected value of the roll becomes undefined?) Sorry to hijack.
Eero Tuovinen:
It's actually quite simply to calculate the odds of getting at least one success in a WW style dice pool, as that double success on tens does not affect whether you got any successes or not: assuming that 7-10 are successes on one die, we can conclude that you have a 60% chance of not getting that one success on one die. Therefore the probability of getting at least one success on three dice is 1-(0.6^3) = 78%.
Probability of getting exactly one success is also simple to calculate, incidentally: you only get exactly one success if no dice hit 10 and only one hits 7-9; the probability for a given die of three to hit 7-9 is 30%, the probability for the other two dice to miss is 0.6^2=0.49 and thus the probability of the entire sequence is 0.49*0.3=0.147. Because each of the three dice might be the one that hits, though, we triple that number to arrive at 44% as the probability of getting exactly one success out of three dice in the WW dice pool. Thus:
No successes - 22%
One success - 44%
More than one success - 34%
Regardless of that, I don't really follow Erik's logic regarding virtual currencies. Perhaps there is some point to it, but to me this seems like a basic property of randomized systems -they have certain probability distributions. There is no magical equivalence or guarantee of a success at three dice threshold if that's intended, though; adding dice increases your chances of succeeding, but doesn't remove the possibility of failure.
Erik Weissengruber:
Quote
Regardless of that, I don't really follow Erik's logic regarding virtual currencies. Perhaps there is some point to it, but to me this seems like a basic property of randomized systems -they have certain probability distributions. There is no magical equivalence or guarantee of a success at three dice threshold if that's intended, though; adding dice increases your chances of succeeding, but doesn't remove the possibility of failure.
I had never divined the probability distributions in the NWoD games being discussed.
Moreover, someone who runs such games regularly described a heruistic for working with the dice: 3 dice will get you one success pretty reliably and you can make decisions based on that heruistic.
some people have questioned the math behind that statement, and noone seems to be saying "yeah, I noticed that too."
I got some real world feedback on an idea and that's all I was looking for. Thanks y'all.
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