Dice Pool Calculator, now with contested rolls

[kearsley]

After realising that it was a relatively simple tweak, I added a second page to the calculator: contested rolls. So let's look at a few scenarios:

(NB: I may have the systems wrong for our game. eyebeams, please tell me if I do, and I'll re-calculate

Comments

[eyebeams]

Hm. I am pondering.

[kearsley]

Neither dataset posted to try to present an answer, more to demonstrate thought processes with these two toy calculators.

[eyebeams]

Well, I have been thinking of raising diffs to 8, but with excessive failure you lose a certain briskness in combat. This may however reveal that it's good idea to have some kind of bidding scheme to trade dice for post-hoc successes.

Exchange rates

[kearsley]

The fair rate is 2 dice / success. So you'd likely want to go higher than that. However, that really benefits the people with dice to spare (7+ in their pool).

Having poked a bit more, I'm starting to lean toward an automatic defence of some sort (but only if you don't split your actions). It makes combat more hurty all around, but means that Gord can actually act in a round without making himself vulnerable, but doesn't make Sandeep invincible (so long as he can't be taking 3 actions / round and still automatically dodging.)

But take a look at the spreadsheet; there's 9 damage models (some are deeply flawed, but are there for completemess) and 9 models of defence, ranging from current through nWoD defence ratings to a pre-emptive soak. Again, some defences are broken for some games, but all of them are presented from levels 1-10 when fighting 1-5 mooks, so you can see how they scale both in player power level and mook ganging-uppiness.

[magicbox]

What sort of thing do you have in the midrange? Sandeep is crazy skilled and Gord is very much like me in the real world. What about someone with a pool of 6? Also what happens to Sandeep if multiple mooks come at him and he has a defence score? Is that better than his attack-once-then-dodge-repeatedly?

[kearsley]

That requires spreadsheeting. I've been writing a rather lengthy set of calculations exploring different options and am almost ready to post it. Combat versus multiple mooks gets its own page, and I'm looking at 1-5 mooks, with various forms of defence.

[kearsley]

Spreadsheeting done and high-level synopsis posted, including Avril (pool 6). As for the spreadsheet, I tried to break it up enough that you don't have to go rooting through 100 rows of combat stats to get to a conclusion.

It should also be relatively modifiable if you want to, e.g. tweak damages. Where it's not is that it relies heavily on a few generated datasets, so if you want to test a rules change, unfortunately, it requires some degree of generating new data.