# Worlds of Design: Always Tell Me the Odds



## Fenris-77 (May 22, 2020)

Nice article. I feel the lack of a bell curve diagram though. People always feel like they know where they're at with a bell curve. It gives them a comfortable sense that the abyss of probability isn't actually staring back at them, but just inviting them over for a nice cup of tea.


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## Jacob Lewis (May 22, 2020)

Yeah, that's my actual ship... er, vehicle!


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## Ovinomancer (May 22, 2020)

lewpuls said:


> This is why the “best team” often fails to win the tournament. This is why some pro sports play seven-game playoff series, in the hope that luck “evens out” and the better team will win.



Pedantic quibble and pet peeve:  No, probabilitues are NEVER a cause of anything.  Teams lose for specific reasons, not probabilities.  Probabilities are models that can help inform decision making, but do not have any impact on actual outcomes.  Else the sports betting industry would be terribly boring.


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## GMMichael (May 22, 2020)

lewpuls said:


> The whole notion of RPG combat as "sport", as something that's "fair", is nonsense in light of these calculations.
> 
> To summarize: For designers, fudging the dice (or the quality of the opposition) is inevitable. For players, it helps to understand probabilities in games



Is there an implied "traditional" in "RPG combat?"  Because some games don't treat combat as sport.  Some games treat it as a gruesome, dirty, blood-spitting disaster (thanks, Zweihaender).

I wouldn't say that dice-(or opposition)-fudging is inevitable.  I'm reading that to mean that fudging must sometimes be used to allow PCs to win a contest, so designers shouldn't stress too much about making a fair game.  But what if the game's rules aren't set up to determine win/loss?  Or what if the game allows the GM to write "victory" into the script, before the battle has begun?  Or it has a built-in fudging rule (like fate points) that players can use?  It's not "fudging" if there's a rule for it!

A follow-up article to this might discuss why GMs should understand the odds behind specific dice-contests, because as the ones with the primary responsibility for modifying those contests, GMs should know the fire with which they're playing.  E.g. how adding a bonus point to a roll in D&D is not equal to adding a bonus point to a Fantasy AGE roll.

PS - Totally agree that PCs shouldn't expect to win every battle.  My characters usually like to avoid combat, in a sort of "I like living" way!


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## clearstream (May 22, 2020)

Ovinomancer said:


> Pedantic quibble and pet peeve:  No, probabilitues are NEVER a cause of anything.  Teams lose for specific reasons, not probabilities.  Probabilities are models that can help inform decision making, but do not have any impact on actual outcomes.  Else the sports betting industry would be terribly boring.



I had a similar quibble, but decided the analogy was only there to illustrate compound odds, not to claim any virtue as a simulation.

Still, I think explaining compound odds isn't all that helpful. Most people struggle to really grasp what it means to have a non-zero chance of failure in the first place. I find myself asking people to first of all think about a coin-flip. And then think about what kinds of things they might be willing to risk on a coin-flip. And then think about possible worlds, where each side of the coin lands us in a different possible world. I then talk about near-certainties, and what that might feel like. And so on.

Working along those lines seems to gradually bring people to understand odds.


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## clearstream (May 22, 2020)

DMMike said:


> Is there an implied "traditional" in "RPG combat?"  Because some games don't treat combat as sport.  Some games treat it as a gruesome, dirty, blood-spitting disaster (thanks, Zweihaender).
> 
> I wouldn't say that dice-(or opposition)-fudging is inevitable.  I'm reading that to mean that fudging must sometimes be used to allow PCs to win a contest, so designers shouldn't stress too much about making a fair game.  But what if the game's rules aren't set up to determine win/loss?  Or what if the game allows the GM to write "victory" into the script, before the battle has begun?  Or it has a built-in fudging rule (like fate points) that players can use?  It's not "fudging" if there's a rule for it!
> 
> A follow-up article to this might discuss why GMs should understand the odds behind specific dice-contests, because as the ones with the primary responsibility for modifying those contests, GMs should know the fire with which they're playing.  E.g. how adding a bonus point to a roll in D&D is not equal to adding a bonus point to a Fantasy AGE roll.



I wrote an article a while back about stakes. Odds mean nothing without stakes. And the stakes in games follow some interesting patterns.


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## atanakar (May 22, 2020)

I never fudge the dice as a DM. Everything is rolled in front of the screen. What's the point of having odds if the GM cheats all the time. PCs should fail or succeed on their own merit or lack of. 

As a DM I feel it's my responsabilty to explain odds of success before a Player wants his PC to do something very unlikely to succeed. I call that a Wisdom 3 moment. If the player persists he will live with the consequences.


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## univoxs (May 22, 2020)

A trope I dislike in traditional TTRPG is that every foe is meant to be fought or else would not be placed before the characters. It is gerenally assumed by the party that every monster is somewhat appropriate for their current power level. Anyone with experiance in WoD games sees this a different way. I encourage my players to talk first stab later, no matter the game.


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## Blue (May 22, 2020)

I'm with Lewis on this one - most people don't actually understand probabilities.  I will often see common sense - and completely wrong - assumptions.  From easy things like not understanding bell curves and thinking d20 is just like 3d6 but with two extra/less at either end, to not understanding the actual odds of X successes before Y failures, to more in depth ones.

A challenge of design is to make these clear.  "d20+modifiers >= DC" isn't hard to grasp, fudges 4dF even easier while a die pool with a required number of successes may mask probability from the casual gamer.  Especially when balancing tryign to let the dice tell the whole story - an 11 doesn't say if you succeed or fail, but some systems have penalty dice built in so that the roll determines success or failure without any additional manipulation - but often at the price of obfuscating the odds even more.


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## Jaeger (May 22, 2020)

DMMike said:


> Is there an implied "traditional" in "RPG combat?"




Yes, whatever the current edition of D&D is.  Market leader sets the tone.



DMMike said:


> I wouldn't say that dice-(or opposition)-fudging is inevitable.  _*I'm reading that to mean that fudging must sometimes be used to allow PCs to win a contest,..*_.




Which is utterly abhorrent of course.

Fudging rolls defeats the whole purpose of the "GAME" in RPG.




DMMike said:


> A follow-up article to this might discuss why GMs should understand the odds behind specific dice-contests, because as the ones with the primary responsibility for modifying those contests, _*GMs should know the fire with which they're playing.*_ ...




This!



atanakar said:


> I never fudge the dice as a DM. Everything is rolled in front of the screen. What's the point of having odds if the GM cheats all the time. PCs should fail or succeed on their own merit or lack of.
> 
> As a DM I feel it's my responsabilty to explain odds of success before a Player wants his PC to do something very unlikely to succeed. I call that a Wisdom 3 moment. If the player persists he will live with the consequences.




And this!


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## Mortus (May 22, 2020)

I ask my players during session 0 if they want my rolls private or public. The only exception is if the character would be unaware of their success like looking for traps. If private, I fudge rolls to better guide the story or to counteract really bad luck.

In my experience all public rolls usually have exceptions too. In a 1E Pathfinder Society game a few GenCons ago, I was playing a 5th level half orc barbarian that I had just leveled up. I was so impressed with his high hit points. In the opening scene we were surprised attacked by mounted warriors with lances. My PC was hit with a crit and killed outright. The GM was kind enough to just leave my PC bleeding and I was bandaged up in the same round.

I think both styles have there pros and cons and I enjoy both.

In the weekly 5E Decent into Avernus I’m playing currently the DM Is rolling publicly. Last game we had a long combat and his luck with the dice was astoundingly bad and we were on fire. At one point in the battle, my buddy took a poorly crafted Molotov cocktail from me to throw on some barricades we had made and I asked the DM for a 1% chance that it would ignite. Of course, my buddy rolled a 1 on 1d100.


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## R_J_K75 (May 22, 2020)

atanakar said:


> I never fudge the dice as a DM. Everything is rolled in front of the screen.




I fudge rolls very little, though I do occasionally, but I generally don't use a screen either, but with playing online now everyones on the honor system. I started gaming with my neighbor a few years back and he made a comment that it seemed to him that they were winning fights that they probably shouldn't have and things were kind of easy.  Even then I wasn't fudging dice much, and I've since stopped.  I've purposely started making combat encounters pretty difficult ever since.  Last combat I ran lasted 2 sessions and went 11 rounds with the players leveling up between sessions.  If they hadn't I think they probably would have died, I think I rolled about 5-6 natural 20s last game, 2 of which were in a row and brought the barbarian down to 2 hp.



univoxs said:


> A trope I dislike in traditional TTRPG is that every foe is meant to be fought or else would not be placed before the characters. It is gerenally assumed by the party that every monster is somewhat appropriate for their current power level.




I don't use random encounters much anymore nor do I map out areas proactively in my games either.  When I did though I definitely would place creatures well outside of the characters ability to defeat here and there.  I would encourage the players to research with the locals before adventuring to get an idea of whats in the area. Even then I would mix in both truth and fiction so that no matter how prepared they were there were still some surprises.  I also treated most creatures as unique and gave them tweaks here and there to make player victory not as assured, but more rewarding when they did win.  Van Richtens Guides to Monster Hunting was really good for ideas on how to do this.


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## hawkeyefan (May 23, 2020)

I had the odds at 10 to 1 this thread would be about rolling dice. I was way off.


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## Nagol (May 23, 2020)

lewpuls said:


> If GMs (and game designers, and gamers) understand “the odds” they will be able to make better choices and understand why some things happen in their games - and some don’t.
> 
> View attachment 119006
> Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​
> ...




It gets really bad when mechanics become opaque and improperly explained.  The original skill challenges in 4e were like this.  Markov chain probabilities are not obvious to most folk.  It was obvious when one did the math that the original designers hadn't.  And that's before the inclusion of auto-fail options in the scenario like the example SC had.  The odds of success without the DM doing something 'off-book' were terrible.


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## Hussar (May 23, 2020)

clearstream said:


> I wrote an article a while back about stakes. Odds mean nothing without stakes. And the stakes in games follow some interesting patterns.




Personally, I think this, right here, is probably one of the biggest table issues that I see.  DM's that don't really understand how odds work that then try to cobble together in game elements where the reward (the stakes) is so much smaller than they should be.  Or, worse yet, cobble together a situation where they don't seem to understand that multiple checks result in much greater chances of failure, particularly if each failed check results in catastrophic failure.

Take the old saw about sneaking around and scouting.  I've seen DM's (and, honestly, BEEN the DM unfortunately) just keep repeatedly calling for checks until the character/group fails and then sit back and say, "Well, you had the chance to sneak past, you just failed".  Neverminding that if you force, say 5 checks and the party has a 25% chance of failure, then failure is pretty much guaranteed.  

The reward in a game MUST reflect the risk.  And this is something that you see over and over again that DM's just don't grasp.


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## prosfilaes (May 23, 2020)

univoxs said:


> A trope I dislike in traditional TTRPG is that every foe is meant to be fought or else would not be placed before the characters. It is gerenally assumed by the party that every monster is somewhat appropriate for their current power level. Anyone with experiance in WoD games sees this a different way. I encourage my players to talk first stab later, no matter the game.




I feel the first part of the article was quite relevant here. If there's a 10% chance of the party dying in any particular battle, they won't last long. In WoD, there's setting features to discourage the bad guys from just murdering the PCs. In D&D, there's creatures that have no reason not to murder any PCs that get near them. Demon lords just aren't going to let a good party get away, and wraiths aren't going to let a living party get away. There's ways to do that without just wiping out the party (and I suspect 5E, which I have limited experience with, might be more merciful than editions where parties raise in power more dramatically), but it's easy to have the party open a door and be dead to an opponent they had no chance of defeating or running from.


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## Shiroiken (May 23, 2020)

univoxs said:


> A trope I dislike in traditional TTRPG is that every foe is meant to be fought or else would not be placed before the characters. It is gerenally assumed by the party that every monster is somewhat appropriate for their current power level. Anyone with experiance in WoD games sees this a different way. I encourage my players to talk first stab later, no matter the game.



In early editions of D&D, there was a chart that would determine the mood of the opposition, allowing for potential negotiations or even just passing each other by. Sometimes it was unrealistic, but that's what the DM's for, to know when to use the chart or ignore it. Of course, in those same editions, killing stuff was a lot less of your xp, so it just wasn't worth it unless necessary.

As for everything should be fought... that's a mentality I've tried to break from a lot of 3E and 4E players. I ran LMoP to teach 5E to an experienced group of 3E players, and they decided to fight the dragon at level 3, where they were immediately killed. One of them asked how you were supposed to kill the dragon, so I asked "what indicated you should even seek out the dragon?" They just heard about the dragon and assumed they were supposed to kill it.



prosfilaes said:


> There's ways to do that without just wiping out the party (and I suspect 5E, which I have limited experience with, might be more merciful than editions where parties raise in power more dramatically), but it's easy to have the party open a door and be dead to an opponent they had no chance of defeating or running from.



This is a failure of adventure design. If you're going to have a party run across something that's way beyond their power level, there should either be hints beforehand (warning them to plan appropriately to avoid or flee) or it should be set up in such a way as to allow the PCs to see the enemy before they can be seen. No one wants a TPK just because of a bad roll on a random encounter table or because they had no idea the cult had managed to summon a demon.

We just ran a Midguard one shot, and most of the adventure was pretty good, but there were absolutely NO clues about what was going on. We reacted to events, trying to find out what might be going on, but instead we had to face a CR 5 as four level 1 PCs. We only pulled it off because we figured out its immediate goal and its weakness (fire), and then were able to keep it from pulling off its goal while in a burning building (we were in it too). My character died heroically making sure the creature didn't escape, which was fine for a one shot, but would have sucked for the start of a campaign. Since we figured we defeated the enemy, we followed its tracks back to its lair in hopes of finding out what was going on. Instead we got hit with a CR 6 creature that had a summoning power, with no warning or chance to escape... TPK. We talked with the DM about it later, and it turns out the only way to figure out what's going on is to kill the CR 5, then reduce the CR6 to 1/4 HP, where it will surrender and explain. Most of the this one shot was really good, as we just assumed we missed something as players, but no it was a deathtrap adventure that really gave the players no chance of success.


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## CapnZapp (May 23, 2020)

As far as I understand it, @lewpuls ,the opaque odds of dice pool games (e.g. Vampire) was intended to be a feature not a bug. That is, people play that game because they don't _want_ to know the (exact) odds.

As someone with a fair grasp of maths and statistics, I have never understood that sentiment. I have always preferred the percentile die as the best resolution system (e.g. Basic Role-Playing) precisely because it makes it very easy to see the odds. (Assuming you understand percentages, of course)

But I guess (and this is not intended to be a personal insult to anyone) if you don't do math, playing a game with opaque probabilities (figuring out the odds in dice pool games is fiendishly difficult) evens out the odds compared to a friend that do math...


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## CapnZapp (May 23, 2020)

Blue said:


> most people don't actually understand probabilities.



I would take a more modest position: 

most people don't actually understand how hard people find probabilities.


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## CapnZapp (May 23, 2020)

I see noone has mentioned the obligatory "dwarves in Runequest charging the enemy" remark.


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## prosfilaes (May 23, 2020)

Shiroiken said:


> As for everything should be fought... that's a mentality I've tried to break from a lot of 3E and 4E players.




Is that fun for them? I think it would be much more fun to have someone discuss new expectations for this game, then kill my character for not playing by rules I had no reason to know.



> They just heard about the dragon and assumed they were supposed to kill it.




That's a playstyle question. A lot of DMs would rather that then worry about spending all session trying to get the PCs to follow a plot hook and them discussing whether they should kill the dragon or maybe it's just plot color.



> This is a failure of adventure design. If you're going to have a party run across something that's way beyond their power level, there should either be hints beforehand (warning them to plan appropriately to avoid or flee) or it should be set up in such a way as to allow the PCs to see the enemy before they can be seen. No one wants a TPK just because of a bad roll on a random encounter table or because they had no idea the cult had managed to summon a demon.




If you're complaining that 



univoxs said:


> It is gerenally assumed by the party that every monster is somewhat appropriate for their current power level.




then every monster still is somewhat appropriate for their current power level. You're just demanding the players use a wider set of tactics. You can say that that is a failure of adventure design, but I think it's one encouraged when people are too free with "not every monster should be defeatable" and forget, or forget to mention, that "every monster must be solvable".


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## Hussar (May 23, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> I would take a more modest position:
> 
> most people don't actually understand how hard people find probabilities.




Fair enough.  It's two sides of the same coin really.  At the end of the day, a very large number of people don't understand probabilities and gut feelings are extremely poor judges as well.  You see it all the time on the forums when people talk about why their players don't try actions that aren't specfically covered by the mechanics.  "My players never think outside the box" goes the cry.  

The trick is, they do think outside the box, but, they quickly realize that anything outside of the box is a suckers better and they are far, far better off staying inside the box.


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## CapnZapp (May 23, 2020)

My point is:

The best designers do not merely have a good grasp of probabilities, they also have a good grasp of how bad human intuition is at probabilities. Then they steer their design away from leading people into "probability traps".

Obviously too many designers don't even clear the first step, but not stopping there with my analysis was my point.


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## clearstream (May 23, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> As far as I understand it, @lewpuls ,the opaque odds of dice pool games (e.g. Vampire) was intended to be a feature not a bug. That is, people play that game because they don't _want_ to know the (exact) odds.
> 
> As someone with a fair grasp of maths and statistics, I have never understood that sentiment. I have always preferred the percentile die as the best resolution system (e.g. Basic Role-Playing) precisely because it makes it very easy to see the odds. (Assuming you understand percentages, of course)
> 
> But I guess (and this is not intended to be a personal insult to anyone) if you don't do math, playing a game with opaque probabilities (figuring out the odds in dice pool games is fiendishly difficult) evens out the odds compared to a friend that do math...



I feel like it is not so much knowing what the odds are, but knowing what that implies, that is at issue. I mean that as you say - percentiles can display the odds plainly - but knowing how to take that is another matter. Say I succeed 75% of the time: what should I stake for what pay-out at those odds, and how should I understand the set of possible future worlds that I might land in?

In very simple terms, I want stake / 75% to be < pay-out. So were we dealing strictly in gp with all values known, then I should not put up 10gp for anything less than say 14gp. The trouble is, and this I guess is part of the OPs general point, that values may be obfuscated. Compounding odds is one way they might be obfuscated, but I think that is fairly easy to notice. Consider the difficulty of knowing going in what sort of creature is worth fighting for how much divers loot and XP? The stakes and pay-outs aren't necessarily commensurable!

One important stake is real time invested in a character, which increases as they go. When I roll up a character, I might have invested say an hour or less. A year in, I might have invested 100 hours or more! That means that odds that might have seemed reasonable (if I knew them) at level 1, might be very unreasonable at level 10. So this is where I find the initial analysis in this thread needing to be expanded on. Yes, compounding odds are often misunderstood, but for me that barely scratches the surface of this complex and interesting aspect of RPG.


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## Hussar (May 23, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> My point is:
> 
> The best designers do not merely have a good grasp of probabilities, they also have a good grasp of how bad human intuition is at probabilities. Then they steer their design away from leading people into "probability traps".
> 
> Obviously too many designers don't even clear the first step, but not stopping there with my analysis was my point.




Yup.  Agree with that.

And, compounded at the table is ego issues as well.  Being able to tell someone that not only is their math wrong, but, why, when their "gut" is telling them that the math is right is such a huge uphill battle.  I remember one DM I had, in a 5e game, who homebrewed a fighter subclass that got, more or less, 2 rounds of advantage on attacks 1/short rest and then 2/short rest later on down the line.  I played the character for quite a while and then complained that my fighter was really, really not dealing much damage and I was really performing under par for a fighter of my level.

No amount of math that I could produce would budge the DM who was absolutely convinced that there was no problem.  I actually had to track the group's damage, round by round, for about 20 rounds and then show him the empirical evidence (my fighter was bottom of the damage pool, and not by a little bit.  By a whole lot) before I could convince him that this wasn't cutting the mustard.


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## CapnZapp (May 23, 2020)

clearstream said:


> I feel like it is not so much knowing what the odds are, but knowing what that implies, that is at issue. I mean that as you say - percentiles can display the odds plainly - but knowing how to take that is another matter. Say I succeed 75% of the time: what should I stake for what pay-out at those odds, and how should I understand the set of possible future worlds that I might land in?
> 
> In very simple terms, I want stake / 75% to be < pay-out. So were we dealing strictly in gp with all values known, then I should not put up 10gp for anything less than say 14gp. The trouble is, and this I guess is part of the OPs general point, that values may be obfuscated. Compounding odds is one way they might be obfuscated, but I think that is fairly easy to notice. Consider the difficulty of knowing going in what sort of creature is worth fighting for how much divers loot and XP? The stakes and pay-outs aren't necessarily commensurable!
> 
> One important stake is real time invested in a character, which increases as they go. When I roll up a character, I might have invested say an hour or less. A year in, I might have invested 100 hours or more! That means that odds that might have seemed reasonable (if I knew them) at level 1, might be very unreasonable at level 10. So this is where I find the initial analysis in this thread needing to be expanded on. Yes, compounding odds are often misunderstood, but for me that barely scratches the surface of this complex and interesting aspect of RPG.



Not sure we're talking about the same thing.

If I can spend a "build point" (or whatever) on getting +5% to my Diplomacy skill of 45%, or to "Murder With Axe", or whatever, I know what I'm getting. What I'm getting is a Diplomacy skill of 50%. Or, given everything equal, I hit with 10 out of 20 axe-swings instead of 9 out of 20 swings.

If I instead get an extra die to my pool of four dice, what do I get?

To me, the number crunching needed to arrive at "a fifth die increases my odds from 47% to 51.9%", ergo I get 4.9% for my money, is entirely and wholly unwelcome. Why would anyone want to go through this step (in practice you need an online probability calculator)? 

Zapp

PS. I mean, apparently the answer is "some don't care", so hey, this man's garbage is your treasure, and so on...


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## CapnZapp (May 23, 2020)

Hussar said:


> No amount of math that I could produce would budge the DM who was absolutely convinced that there was no problem.  I actually had to track the group's damage, round by round, for about 20 rounds and then show him the empirical evidence (my fighter was bottom of the damage pool, and not by a little bit.  By a whole lot) before I could convince him that this wasn't cutting the mustard.



Honestly, I would have tried a different approach. Instead of bludgeoning him with math, I would simply choose to play a different character. I would say "your subclass is probably fine, I just want to try out this druid here or that sorcerer there".

That is, a GM should not be bound to offer only mathematically sound options. We can and should hold professional game developers to this standard, but I wouldn't impose this on homebrew content.


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## Nutation (May 23, 2020)

lewpuls said:


> Extrapolate that into RPG sessions with perhaps one big battle per session, or maybe more! Practically speaking, either you need really astute players willing to run away from almost any encounter, in order to avoid taking chances, or you need to arrange a huge bias in favor of the players in a typical encounter. Or they're going to lose and possibly die pretty soon.




I didn't see much discussion of this. It's not that the GM might need to fudge the die rolls, it's that the designer has already fudged things so that a "moderate" encounter is heavily weighted in the players' favor, and a even a "deadly" encounter is as well.


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## aramis erak (May 23, 2020)

Again, reduction to the absurd. Mr. Pulsipher, you really need to think through your editorial comments better, because if they are in fact reflective of your thought processes, then you're not seeing the obvious in front of you. And if they aren't reflective, well, then dumbing them down is not a service.

Fairness in RPG combat is artifice, but it's not illusory. There are several kinds...
There is the "Fair Encounters reduce X resources" mode of almost all editions of D&D.
There is the "Even odds" mode of some other games, where PCs and NPCs of similar rating are of similar threat, as in Dragon Warriors. If the party meets a party of same rank-equivalent, it's abut 50-50 odds.
There's the "should be able to complete in X turns" approach of Sentinel Comics... it's "balanced" encounters are suitably set for genre emulation.  Actual defeat of the major foes is under 50%... they have minions and lieutenants to prevent their being killed or captured. Stopping their current plan, however... well, let's just say, of the hard scenes, less than 50% were successes in stopping the plan, either.
There is the "no difference in rules" approach of Traveller, Runequest, and many others. It's an entirely different level of fair. And I've had many a campaign cut short because players assumed that the odds were tilted towards them... in greivous error.

Excepting that first type, no one wants a fair fight.

That's also different from a "Balanced Encounter" as laid out in D&D 3E, 4E, and 5E... which is a specific subset of the resources spend. A 5E encounter of hard isn't so much "players will have a hard time winning" as "players will have a hard time winning without notable costs." 

Fairness in RPG combat is many different things.

Now, the odds in combat are one element - and the "balance" is most keenly desireable there.

Your example of tournament play of team sports is, however, unsubtle and almost misleading. RPG combats are not "Win or Lose." And this is this week's element handled poorly, apparently not thought through in your editorial.

RPG combats have, at the very least, three axises of result:

Achieve the goal of combat or not, or even partially
Expend all, most, some, a few, or no resources. (damage, ammo, exhaustion, minions)
Player satisfaction with the way it plays out. (noting that Satisfaction may not be enjoyment in the immediate scene, but can result from eventual overcoming of the issues the character faced in scene.)
I've seen cases where player satisfaction was lowered because of success without costs... anticlimactic combat isn't fun for everyone, especially not me.

I've also had sessions which players labeled "Not fun, but really, a great story came out of it"...

Knowing the odds going in also can reduce player satisfaction... which is why the 3E, 4E, and 5E D&D DMG's various methods of "balanced" encounters don't encourage telling players what difficulty level the encounter was set at.


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## Blue (May 23, 2020)

clearstream said:


> One important stake is real time invested in a character, which increases as they go. When I roll up a character, I might have invested say an hour or less. A year in, I might have invested 100 hours or more! That means that odds that might have seemed reasonable (if I knew them) at level 1, might be very unreasonable at level 10. So this is where I find the initial analysis in this thread needing to be expanded on. Yes, compounding odds are often misunderstood, but for me that barely scratches the surface of this complex and interesting aspect of RPG.




Pardon my generalization, but this is a very D&D-type calculation.  Where the most common odds are win or die.  Other shades of loss are not as commonly seen.  (And when survival and win are the same, we often get players conflating their character winning with them winning, which is a closely related but completely separate problem.)

First, player don't understand the odds of dying. In many way *this is a good thing*.  That's because the DM can establish stakes of _fear_ of death, which is actually a good distance away from _actual_ death. So lack of knowledge of the odds leads you to think that you've made a much bigger bet, and you can enjoy the adrenaline of that bet.

If you feel like you are betting 100 hours of play, you feel like you have it all on the line.  Really, that's not the bet you are currently facing - there is a good buffer between down and dead.  So really you are waging 15 minutes of non-activity - about one turn before someone stands you back up.

Even if you die, at 10th level you're now betting about getting hit with a revivfy, which is a noticeable but not exorbitant resource cost.  Clerics, bards with magical secrets, divine sorcerers/warlock - lots of ways to have it.  Safe bet is the party has it.

It's only after that where what you're wagering gets big - either significant amount of time sitting out until your character can be raised (after next long rest or after travel to an NPC), or (finally!) the 100 hours of play.


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## Blue (May 23, 2020)

Hussar said:


> And, compounded at the table is ego issues as well.  Being able to tell someone that not only is their math wrong, but, why, when their "gut" is telling them that the math is right is such a huge uphill battle.  I remember one DM I had, in a 5e game, who homebrewed a fighter subclass that got, more or less, 2 rounds of advantage on attacks 1/short rest and then 2/short rest later on down the line.  I played the character for quite a while and then complained that my fighter was really, really not dealing much damage and I was really performing under par for a fighter of my level.
> 
> No amount of math that I could produce would budge the DM who was absolutely convinced that there was no problem.  I actually had to track the group's damage, round by round, for about 20 rounds and then show him the empirical evidence (my fighter was bottom of the damage pool, and not by a little bit.  By a whole lot) before I could convince him that this wasn't cutting the mustard.




As a side note, that amount of advantage is more than the official Samurai fighter subclass, which only gets 3 rounds per long rest, and it takes their bonus action to activate for each of those rounds.  Combining with Action Surge most consider that enough.


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## Shiroiken (May 23, 2020)

prosfilaes said:


> Is that fun for them? I think it would be much more fun to have someone discuss new expectations for this game, then kill my character for not playing by rules I had no reason to know.



I warn every new player I introduce (new to 5E or new to D&D). This is a new edition of the game, with new styles and rules. I usually place "Not everything can be defeated or overcome" right after "not everything requires a die roll," but just before explaining "what is a short rest vs a long rest." It's possible that some players get overwhelmed, but with 3E and 4E players, I've found more often than not they bring baggage from prior editions into the game (which we have all pretty much done unless we started with 5E; I STILL forget some of the things I remember from the playtests that were removed). When it happens the first time, I can understand, but I've had players continue this mentality even after a TPK, which leads to the following:



prosfilaes said:


> That's a playstyle question. A lot of DMs would rather that then worry about spending all session trying to get the PCs to follow a plot hook and them discussing whether they should kill the dragon or maybe it's just plot color.



I can accept that it's a playstyle, and that there's nothing wrong with it (even if I disagree with it). However, these players made the very odd assumption that they'd have to fight the dragon eventually, with absolutely no clues about it what-so-ever other than "it destroyed a small town and turned it into its lair." There were no adventure clues that led them in that direction, in fact they had lots of clues that led them elsewhere. They just thought they could take a dragon at level 3, because it's in the adventure. That's not a playstyle, that's meta-gaming the adventure.



prosfilaes said:


> If you're complaining that
> 
> "It is gerenally assumed by the party that every monster is somewhat appropriate for their current power level."
> 
> then every monster still is somewhat appropriate for their current power level. You're just demanding the players use a wider set of tactics. You can say that that is a failure of adventure design, but I think it's one encouraged when people are too free with "not every monster should be defeatable" and forget, or forget to mention, that "every monster must be solvable".



Not every monster is solvable, nor should it be. I'll admit that an adventure that fails to warn of ridiculous danger is wrong (such as the "open a door, rocks fall, everyone dies" trope). The only time an challenge (monster or otherwise) must be solvable, is if the adventure requires it to be overcome for success, not simply because it exists. If the players knew a dragon is in its lair, the only "solvable" solution is to avoid the place, which I have a hard time accepting as a solution, merely common sense (you don't get xp for avoiding monsters, for example). Warning the party of ridiculous danger, only to then have the party deliberately seek it (especially if it has nothing to do with the current agenda) is not a failure of adventure design, its a failure of the players.


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## Hussar (May 24, 2020)

Blue said:


> As a side note, that amount of advantage is more than the official Samurai fighter subclass, which only gets 3 rounds per long rest, and it takes their bonus action to activate for each of those rounds.  Combining with Action Surge most consider that enough.




True, but, a Samurai also gets bonus HP, bonus proficiencies and, at 10th level, an automatic recharge of advantage every time you roll initiative.  It's a bit more than the 2 rounds of advantage and nothing else that the homebrew class gave me.  

And, @CapnZapp I strongly disagree.  We SHOULD hold DM's up to the same standard as game designers if those DM's are choosing to be game designers.  If they are offering options that are wonky mathematically, then players absolutely should stand up and tell them.  Abandoning a character because the DM screwed you over because the DM doesn't grasp math is a very bad road to go down.  

I mean, imagine the scene for a moment.  "Yeah, I've been playing this homebrew class you've been working on for a while now.  Just not feeling it, so, I want to drop this character for something out of the PHB" is going to go over like a lead balloon.  It's pretty obvious what the player is doing.  And, instead of working with the DM to try to fix the issue, the player is taking the passive aggressive path and sideways telling the DM that his or her idea is crap, but, not only is it crap, it's not even worth my time to try to fix.

I'd much, much rather players were far more open and honest with me than that.

So, yeah, a DM is absolutely "bound to offer only mathematically sound options. "  A DM who forgets that is just screwing over his players.


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## prosfilaes (May 24, 2020)

Shiroiken said:


> They just thought they could take a dragon at level 3, because it's in the adventure. That's not a playstyle, that's meta-gaming the adventure.




D&D Beyond has more than a page of dragons of CR 3 or less. I think you've overestimating how much the players know about anything; in D&D 3 and derived versions, any CR 1/2 humanoid could have 20 levels of a class. The only reason they think they can take anything is because it's in the adventure, or because the PCs are overconfident and practically suicidal--which is practically the definition of a PC.



> If the players knew a dragon is in its lair, the only "solvable" solution is to avoid the place, which I have a hard time accepting as a solution, merely common sense (you don't get xp for avoiding monsters, for example).




Huh? Common sense says not to go in the dungeon; let someone else risk their life. But you don't get XP for avoiding monsters, and if that's too meta for you, you don't get GP or magic either. 



> Warning the party of ridiculous danger, only to then have the party deliberately seek it (especially if it has nothing to do with the current agenda) is not a failure of adventure design, its a failure of the players.




It certainly can be confusing what's ridiculous danger and what's reasonable danger. And the "current agenda" certainly makes it feel like the PCs can stay safe if they stay on the rails.


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## Shiroiken (May 24, 2020)

prosfilaes said:


> The only reason they think they can take anything is because it's in the adventure, or because the PCs are overconfident and practically suicidal--which is practically the definition of a PC.



You have a strange definition of a PC, but whatever floats your boat.



prosfilaes said:


> Huh? Common sense says not to go in the dungeon; let someone else risk their life. But you don't get XP for avoiding monsters, and if that's too meta for you, you don't get GP or magic either.



I meant that as a "solvable" monster, simply avoiding it isn't solving it, which is why you don't get xp (or treasure or magic) from avoiding said monster. Thus the monster isn't "solvable," which was your original assertion. Some things simply cannot be solved.


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## prosfilaes (May 24, 2020)

To make clear my position: a D&D world would realistically kill virtually all adventuring parties, as sooner or later they'd run into something they couldn't defeat and they couldn't retreat from. For a group of PCs to survive to high levels requires a lot of stacking of the deck towards them. That's why PCs have to be overconfident and nigh-suicidal.

I would say that there are times when a party should retreat and certainly times when they should parley.  But the DM can't just tell the players that and expect not to have problems. You can railroad them, and punish them when they go outside the area you want. But providing reasonable options while not surprise killing the PCs is hard, and it's easy to blame the players for stuff that would have been hard for them to avoid.



Shiroiken said:


> I meant that as a "solvable" monster, simply avoiding it isn't solving it, which is why you don't get xp (or treasure or magic) from avoiding said monster. Thus the monster isn't "solvable," which was your original assertion. Some things simply cannot be solved.




So my assertion is false if you don't use my definitions. Okay?


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## Hussar (May 24, 2020)

I'll give another example of risk/reward calculations.

In Star Trek Adventures, you are typically rolling 2d20 for most checks.  Sometimes 3 (or possibly more) and sometimes 1d20, but, typically, you roll 2d20.  Now, in the rules, if you roll a 20 on a check, you get a complication.  But, and here's the kicker, the "complication" is largely left up to the DM to define.  

So, think about it for a second.  On 2d20, you have a 9.75% chance (just a smidge less than 1 in 10) of rolling a 20.  If you have a group of 5 players, it's pretty much guaranteed that SOMEONE is going to roll a 20 every round.  So, how much of a complication should this complication be?  So far, in the game, it's been pretty brutal.  The DM defines complication as a pretty serious failure, which means being out of position, easier to be shot, breaking equipment, etc.  Since this is happening virtually every round, it has made the game extremely lethal.

I totally get what people mean about not understanding the math.  If something is so common that it occurs all the time, then it cannot actually be much of an effect.  Or, rather, it shouldn't be much of an effect.  But, because of the vaguaries of the dice, it's actually a disadvantage to roll more dice, even though your chances of success increase, you are also increasing your chances of complications, which negate the successes.

It's rather frustrating to be honest.


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## Fenris-77 (May 24, 2020)

Hmm. I'd probably use the other die that isn't a 20 to rate the seriousness of the complication. 20 and a 3? Just a minor snafu. 20 and 19? Take cover Arizona. I like that answer because it uses the numbers already on the table in an intuitive way. Something of that sort should have been included in the game. Maybe not tables of specific fumbles, but a solid set of guidelines, or something. The system as is puts too much cognitive load on the GM IMO, absent a decent set of guidelines.

Edit - if more dice is meant to be a positive indicator of skill, I'd take the lowest non-20 result from the batch.


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## aramis erak (May 24, 2020)

@Hussar STA playtest had much more concrete advice than the release. It was actually quite nice to have the explicit costs in threat.

The release does have some advice - either a trait, an unpleasant fact, or a change in threat rating... and traits are the really vague part:

+1 to some type of action
-1 to some type of action
Prohibit some kind of action
Enable some kind of action
use with momentum to establish a fact
(rarely) Allows purchase of a talent
This is where things start to fall apart: 3&4 are much stronger than 1, 2, and 5. 6 is just there for racial traits. But they have the same cost: 2 threat, or 1 complication.


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## clearstream (May 24, 2020)

Blue said:


> Pardon my generalization, but this is a very D&D-type calculation.  Where the most common odds are win or die.  Other shades of loss are not as commonly seen.  (And when survival and win are the same, we often get players conflating their character winning with them winning, which is a closely related but completely separate problem.)



It will be true wherever a character might be played for multiple sessions while there is any non-zero chance of their becoming unplayable as an outcome of the game mechanics.

D&D, Pathfinder, RuneQuest, Earthdawn, Shadowrun, Bushido, et al.

That can be nuanced as you say, of course, but the change in the wager over time is also profound.


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## CapnZapp (May 24, 2020)

Hussar said:


> So, yeah, a DM is absolutely "bound to offer only mathematically sound options. " A DM who forgets that is just screwing over his players.



Sorry, that's unconstructive and antagonistic to me.

You might find that changing your uncompromising stand makes more DMs willing to have you as a player.


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## Hussar (May 24, 2020)

aramis erak said:


> @Hussar STA playtest had much more concrete advice than the release. It was actually quite nice to have the explicit costs in threat.
> 
> The release does have some advice - either a trait, an unpleasant fact, or a change in threat rating... and traits are the really vague part:
> 
> ...




Yeah, I've been noodling around on Reddit and there's a number of fixes for this.  We've just started with the system, so, still ironing kinks out.  

So, yes, it's entirely a fixable issue.  100%.  Now we'll have to see if the person running the game sees the issue or not.


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## Hussar (May 24, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> Sorry, that's unconstructive and antagonistic to me.
> 
> You might find that changing your uncompromising stand makes more DMs willing to have you as a player.




Heh.  Never had a problem with that.  

I find the larger problem of DM's being unwilling to compromise and accept that they can just as easily make mistakes as the rest of us makes for awful DM's and bad games.  How is it antagonistic to expect the DM's homebrew options not to be a mechanical screw job?  How is it compromising to accept that the DM is wrong, flat out wrong, but, refuses to accept that he or she has made a mistake?  

Sorry, if you want to sit in the big daddy chair, then you get to wear the big daddy pants and take responsibility for your mistakes.  And, frankly, many DM's out there are very, very bad at this sort of math and it shows.  All you have to do is look at examples on the forums of how folks would "rule" various things to see that there's a significant number of DM's out there that really should be held to a higher standard than they are.

I'm sorry you think that, "Hey, I expect your homebrew material to not screw me over, and, when I show you that yes, you are indeed screwing me over, can we please change your house rules" is an antagonistic and uncompromising stand, but, well, it's a standard I think all DM's should be holding themselves to.  It's certainly the standard I try to hold myself to.


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## clearstream (May 24, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> Not sure we're talking about the same thing.
> 
> If I can spend a "build point" (or whatever) on getting +5% to my Diplomacy skill of 45%, or to "Murder With Axe", or whatever, I know what I'm getting. What I'm getting is a Diplomacy skill of 50%. Or, given everything equal, I hit with 10 out of 20 axe-swings instead of 9 out of 20 swings.
> 
> ...



I mean that people can know the odds - 60% say - while not being able to clearly visualise what that should entail. How it should impact on their decision-making. Features like the number of checks in the given timeframe, and what might interact with those checks, matter.

Take your example of hitting on a) 10 out of 20 swings instead of b) 9 out of 20. This is meaningful in a few ways. In a) I expect to hit once for each two swings I make. How should I think about that if I am only making one swing in a combat? What about if I get to make 5 swings? What is the consequence of a swing? What action do I give up to make that swing? What if I have advantage or disadvantage? What about inspiration? What about a flat bonus or penalty? Even keeping things very simple, it is unlikely the player has in mind a probability distribution function that is up to the job of predicting exactly how this plays out. They need mental tools for interpreting the %age. And really, a %age is no more beneficial than any other representation of odds. It give us nice round numbers - so great - but so does d20.

What is the difference between 10/20 and 9/20 going to be experientially? Knowing the %age doesn't give you the whole picture. What I should be thinking is something like - combats are about four rounds (say) and I make a swing per round and it takes three swings to deal enough damage to drop this ogre so perhaps I need to get out of here. The ogre probably only hits me 15% of the time (I might not know what those odds are), but if it does I'm likely to be downed (or I might not know what the damage range is, only that it is large).

Diplomacy is usually used in a contest situation, or to beat a threshold. Without knowing that contest or threshold, +5% doesn't tell you much. Yes, it is better. So was getting the extra die.

OTOH what I think you are saying is that game mechanics shouldn't needlessly obfuscate their performance: that, I can get on-board with.


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## CapnZapp (May 24, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Heh.  Never had a problem with that.



I suspect you don't see the irony in that statement. 

Anyway, we're done here.


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## CapnZapp (May 24, 2020)

clearstream said:


> And really, a %age is no more beneficial than any other representation of odds. It give us nice round numbers - so great - but so does d20.



45% is certainly no more helpful than "9 out of 20".

But I'm not talking about that, I'm contrasting transparent to opaque odds.

Something like "45%" or "get +1 to your d20 roll" is transparent.

Something like "get +1 to your 2d6 roll" is immediately less transparent, since it requires an understanding of bell curves. Same with D&D's advantage "roll two dice, pick the best" (which gives the most benefit when your original success rate was 50%).

And then there's the profoundly opaque resolution systems of dice pool games: How likely are you to "roll five dice, get two successes"? Which is best - "gain an extra die" or "get +1 to all your dice"?

Cheers


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## Fenris-77 (May 24, 2020)

I feel like we could, as a forum, easily produce a stats primer of some kind that explains some of the basic math behind some of these examples. It doesn't need to be 100% precise, just close enough for people to make better decisions. Maybe a wiki...


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## dragoner (May 24, 2020)

lewpuls said:


> To summarize: For designers, fudging the dice (or the quality of the opposition) is inevitable. For players, it helps to understand probabilities in games




The Traveller Book (1982), Page 13:
_"The rolling of dice is a convenient way to represent unknown variables or to assist the referee in making decisions. Feel free to modify the results if you do not like the way they turned out." _

"If you are in a fair fight, you are doing something wrong." Old military maxim. As GM, it's good to drop hints at what the likely outcomes are going to be. Even then, use some napoleonic tactics, or the antagonists have a light mortar? Can be extremely deadly, so I find myself fudging even that. Then again I have seen GM's actively fudge things against players who are doing things too well.


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## clearstream (May 24, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> 45% is certainly no more helpful than "9 out of 20".
> 
> But I'm not talking about that, I'm contrasting transparent to opaque odds.
> 
> ...



True enough. What do you think the benefit of those mechanics are? Why do people use them?


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## Blue (May 24, 2020)

Shiroiken said:


> I meant that as a "solvable" monster, simply avoiding it isn't solving it, which is why you don't get xp (or treasure or magic) from avoiding said monster. Thus the monster isn't "solvable," which was your original assertion. Some things simply cannot be solved.




That's why I moved away from monster XP.  It's full of actively harmful behavior modification, both in what players are rewarded to do do and what they aren't.

If the goal is to get into the kingpin's chamber and deal with him, killing guards, bribing guards, sneaking past guards, taking a trap-filled secret route that avoid the guards, tricking guards - all of those deal with challenge of "getting into the chamber".  "Killing guards" is just one equal way among many of accomplishing it and shouldn't carry more or less rewards than others.  Solving for "monster" instead of solving for plot leads in the wrong direction to me.


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## Blue (May 24, 2020)

Hussar said:


> I'll give another example of risk/reward calculations.
> 
> In Star Trek Adventures, you are typically rolling 2d20 for most checks.  Sometimes 3 (or possibly more) and sometimes 1d20, but, typically, you roll 2d20.  Now, in the rules, if you roll a 20 on a check, you get a complication.  But, and here's the kicker, the "complication" is largely left up to the DM to define.
> 
> So, think about it for a second.  On 2d20, you have a 9.75% chance (just a smidge less than 1 in 10) of rolling a 20.  If you have a group of 5 players, it's pretty much guaranteed that SOMEONE is going to roll a 20 every round.




This is not picking on you, but just a great example.

Even people who understand probability (shown from Hussar's chance at a complication for a single roll) to misjudge it.  The chance of it happening in a round with 5 rolls is 1 - ( .9025^5 ), showing that only ~40% of the rounds have complication(s).

And for math that is harder: 5 tries 9.75% success - Wolfram|Alpha

Multiple tests is an easy place for even savvy people to lose track of the actual probabilities.


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## CapnZapp (May 24, 2020)

clearstream said:


> True enough. What do you think the benefit of those mechanics are? Why do people use them?



Assuming you mean the latter, opaque, ones, I have no better answer than the one I already gave:



CapnZapp said:


> As far as I understand it, lewpuls, the opaque odds of dice pool games (e.g. Vampire) was intended to be a feature not a bug. That is, people play that game because they don't _want_ to know the (exact) odds.






> But I guess (and this is not intended to be a personal insult to anyone) if you don't do math, playing a game with opaque probabilities (figuring out the odds in dice pool games is fiendishly difficult) evens out the odds compared to a friend that do math...




In short - I have no idea.


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## Hussar (May 25, 2020)

Blue said:


> This is not picking on you, but just a great example.
> 
> Even people who understand probability (shown from Hussar's chance at a complication for a single roll) to misjudge it.  The chance of it happening in a round with 5 rolls is 1 - ( .9025^5 ), showing that only ~40% of the rounds have complication(s).
> 
> ...




Heh.  This really does illustrate the point nicely doesn't it.  Of course 5 tries is about 40% chance.  I was thinking that it was 9.75/die, not /try.  

Which really does roll it back around to the point I made about DM's making judgements at the table.  It's very, very easy to get it wrong.  Particularly when you're doing a snap judgement at the table.  After all, a 60% chance of success isn't _hard_, is it?   Hard should be down around 30% chance of success.  But, the thing is, 60% success rates are pretty difficult.   If you are failing to do something about 1 try in 3, that's a pretty hard task that you're attempting.

But, most DM's don't grok that because it's not really very intuitive.  And, then, you start adding in egos at the table, and it can get messy, REALLY quickly.


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## clearstream (May 25, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> Assuming you mean the latter, opaque, ones, I have no better answer than the one I already gave:



I want to understand the motives for a thing in order to critique that thing. Thinking about dice pools, I can appreciate their tactile qualities - it's really pleasant to pick up a bunch of dice and roll them - and the way they push me toward an intuitive and approximate rather than analytical and exact idea of the odds. A long time ago, and ultimately unsuccessfully, I designed an RPG in which the dice represented spirits that players can use and exhaust; each having faces with unique numberings and additional game effects. There have of course been many other forays into this design space.

It seems like the purpose of dice pools might be exactly contrary to the assumptions of the OP, whose analysis appears built upon a notion that players should, and need to, know their odds. The question it makes me ask is, why? Why does it really matter that players know their odds? I could come back with a notion that they should _not_ know their odds, but only when their chances are improved or worsened, and when they are stronger or weaker. I could even think that knowing the odds in any exact sense is a chimera.

Not that I am not defending any specific position here. I'm digging into when and why one might _not_ want to know the odds. The OP offers a one-dimensional analysis of the subject, notwithstanding that I appreciate the thought and effort in writing, and that it has prompted an interesting discussion.


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## clearstream (May 25, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Heh.  This really does illustrate the point nicely doesn't it.  Of course 5 tries is about 40% chance.  I was thinking that it was 9.75/die, not /try.
> 
> Which really does roll it back around to the point I made about DM's making judgements at the table.  It's very, very easy to get it wrong.  Particularly when you're doing a snap judgement at the table.  After all, a 60% chance of success isn't _hard_, is it?   Hard should be down around 30% chance of success.  But, the thing is, 60% success rates are pretty difficult.   If you are failing to do something about 1 try in 3, that's a pretty hard task that you're attempting.



I feel like an important DM skill is sizing how much you are increasing or worsening the odds. Say you concede to a group check instead of individual checks: how much difference is that making? Suppose you apply disadvantage or even a rare flat minus or penalty die, is that going to be a big or small change? Sizing doesn't need to be exact to be useful.

When you say that hard is 30% chance of success, you are saying a number of things. On the surface, you are saying that on roughly three times that I try this, I only succeed once. If using a d20 and the consequences of failure rules from the DMG, you are also saying that about half the time something very bad happens. You're saying that bardic inspiration will increase your chance of success to close to a coin-flip. At 60%, bardic inspiration nearly halves the count of possible worlds in which you fail. And then there are contests, where the bar is not necessarily fixed.

The difference between success on 15-20 and success on 9-20 is a complex beast. What's at stake also matters. A 40% chance of perma-death versus a 60% chance of losing 1gp say. That context is crucial.



Hussar said:


> But, most DM's don't grok that because it's not really very intuitive.



Perhaps in the end all that needs to be grokked is exactly that which is intuitive. This is where I see some virtue in the OP. A DM needs a sense for when chances are good or bad remembering that they compound over trials, and against that what is going to produce a big change, and what a small change, so that they can consciously apply whichever they want.


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## Hussar (May 25, 2020)

clearstream said:


> /snip
> 
> It seems like the purpose of dice pools might be exactly contrary to the assumptions of the OP, whose analysis appears built upon a notion that players should, and need to, know their odds. The question it makes me ask is, why? Why does it really matter that players know their odds? I could come back with a notion that they should _not_ know their odds, but only when their chances are improved or worsened, and when they are stronger or weaker. I could even think that knowing the odds in any exact sense is a chimera.
> 
> Not that I am not defending any specific position here. I'm digging into when and why one might _not_ want to know the odds. The OP offers a one-dimensional analysis of the subject, notwithstanding that I appreciate the thought and effort in writing, and that it has prompted an interesting discussion.




When you say, "players" are you including the GM/DM in there?  Because I'd argue that it's very important that the person running the game is cognizant of the odds of success.  Primarily because when the person running the game doesn't know the odds, then most of the time, the odds get stacked up against the PC's, because the DM/GM  want's to "challenge" the characters, typically.  The trick is, when the GM doesn't understand the odds, the line can very quickly shift from "challenging" to "virtually impossible."

Like I said earlier, the whole "I scout ahead" thing typically goes tits up because the GM doesn't understand that when he forces repeated checks, and any failure is a catastrophic failure, we've moved from difficult to impossible.


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## Schmoe (May 25, 2020)

Hussar said:


> When you say, "players" are you including the GM/DM in there?  Because I'd argue that it's very important that the person running the game is cognizant of the odds of success.  Primarily because when the person running the game doesn't know the odds, then most of the time, the odds get stacked up against the PC's, because the DM/GM  want's to "challenge" the characters, typically.  The trick is, when the GM doesn't understand the odds, the line can very quickly shift from "challenging" to "virtually impossible."
> 
> Like I said earlier, the whole "I scout ahead" thing typically goes tits up because the GM doesn't understand that when he forces repeated checks, and any failure is a catastrophic failure, we've moved from difficult to impossible.




I realize I'm kind of changing the subject slightly here, but I think stealthing around is actually one situation where multiple checks can often be appropriate.  The key each success needs to yield something beneficial - whether it's a good ambush position, access to something that wasn't previously available, or previously hidden information.  It's perfectly normal, for example, to make a roll to sneak closer to a booth where a conversation is overheard and the rogue can see an alarm button, and then force another roll if the rogue wants to try to make it over to the alarm and disable it.


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## clearstream (May 25, 2020)

Schmoe said:


> I realize I'm kind of changing the subject slightly here, but I think stealthing around is actually one situation where multiple checks can often be appropriate.  The key each success needs to yield something beneficial - whether it's a good ambush position, access to something that wasn't previously available, or previously hidden information.  It's perfectly normal, for example, to make a roll to sneak closer to a booth where a conversation is overheard and the rogue can see an alarm button, and then force another roll if the rogue wants to try to make it over to the alarm and disable it.



I think by RAI (and maybe RAW) the rogue makes one check and that rides until stealth is broken. So in the case outlined, there is mechanically no requirement for a second check unless stealth was broken while eavesdropping. Possibly with the sort of concerns @Hussar has raised in mind.


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## CodeFlayer (May 25, 2020)

I think the math matters if the table decides it does. This is because D&D can be played in many, not necessarily disjoint ways, such as (wargame, story, TotM, ...).


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## CapnZapp (May 25, 2020)

CodeFlayer said:


> I think the math matters if the table decides it does. This is because D&D can be played in many, not necessarily disjoint ways, such as (wargame, story, TotM, ...).



If a game's math works, it can be ignored if you don't need it.

If it doesn't work, you can't just magically make it work if you do.

In other words, there's zero justification for broken game math. That doesn't mean you must play that way, only it needs to be there for those who want to use it.


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## prabe (May 25, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> If a game's math works, it can be ignored if you don't need it.
> 
> If it doesn't work, you can't just magically make it work if you do.
> 
> In other words, there's zero justification for broken game math. That doesn't mean you must play that way, only it needs to be there for those who want to use it.




Related: If the game's math is broken, and you're not a math person, you won't know why the game isn't working the way you expect and you won't have a prayer of fixing it.


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## CodeFlayer (May 25, 2020)

What I find magical is how you got from what I said to where you went.


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## Hussar (May 25, 2020)

CodeFlayer said:


> What I find magical is how you got from what I said to where you went.




Not speaking for anyone else, but, I went the exact same way when I read your post.  Could you perhaps rephrase it because, apparently, I'm not the only one who missed what you meant.


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## CodeFlayer (May 25, 2020)

Sure - I'm in a thread discussing the appropriateness of teaching and/or requiring a working knowledge of probability to play reasonably well, as a wargame. What I am suggesting is that it is the body of players _at the table together_ that decide what the ground rules are for the RPG. Most games I have seen give the GM wide latitude. It is the shared experience, and the quality of it, that is paramount. That means that, with the table's consent, I _can_ take control of the mathematics of the simulation. The game designers don't reach that deep or that far, as I see it.

It is not my intend to sow discord - so please explain how you took my words some other way. I am new here.


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## Hussar (May 26, 2020)

Ok.  That clears it up.  Your initial post made it sound more like math doesn't really matter because the group will just "work around" bad math. 

Yes, we need to give the DM pretty wide latitude, fair enough.  But, there does come a time when it should be appropriate, or, at least not seen as antagonistic, to question the DM's math.  I find that in situations where the rules aren't terribly explicit, DM's often err far too much on the side of caution which turns a difficult task into one that's virtually impossible, or, where the rewards aren't worth the risk.

Take the old saw about swinging by the chandelier across the room to attack someone.  There is a school of thought which says that you have to break that down into several individual actions in order to succeed.  Jump to the chandelier, cut the rope holding it in place, make an attack.  And, if any of those checks fail, the entire attack fails and the action is lost.

So, what sort of benefit should we give the PC for attempting something like this?  Say it's a 50:50 chance for each step.  That's a 1 in 8 chance of success.  IOW, even though each step doesn't look that hard, (most DM's wouldn't consider a 50% chance of success as hard), by requiring so many checks, it becomes extremely unlikely to succeed.  So, if you have a 1 in 8 chance of success, the reward has to be at least 4 times greater than if you just shot him with a ranged weapon. 

How many DM's would allow you to deal 4X damage for this maneuver?

This is what I keep coming back to.  Because the risk:reward calculation is so bad, no one tries doing anything outside the box because, most of the time, anything outside the box is either going to fail, or will never actually reward you as much as it should.

-----

Edited to fix math.  Dammit.


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## CodeFlayer (May 26, 2020)

There is more nuance here than perhaps I had first thought - I will reconsider. Thank you.


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## clearstream (May 26, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Ok.  That clears it up.  Your initial post made it sound more like math doesn't really matter because the group will just "work around" bad math.
> 
> Yes, we need to give the DM pretty wide latitude, fair enough.  But, there does come a time when it should be appropriate, or, at least not seen as antagonistic, to question the DM's math.  I find that in situations where the rules aren't terribly explicit, DM's often err far too much on the side of caution which turns a difficult task into one that's virtually impossible, or, where the rewards aren't worth the risk.
> 
> ...



It's tricky, though. The multiple of damage need not be the same as the change in chance to hit: the two are related, but not perfectly commensurable. Consider the power attacks (-5 for +10 damage).

And then there is also the nuance that I was going to hit in one of two possible worlds, now one of eight, so I would need four (not eight) attempts to be back to where I was. Suggesting a 4x multiple. I'm not knocking your example, only trying to say that the implications are far from straightforward even where one knows the odds. In a d20 system it might be about right to give +1 to +2 damage for each -1 to hit. I went from 11+ to about 18+ so anything from +7 to +14 damage could be right.

I honestly believe the conversation is somewhat empty without factoring in stakes. And one way to think about the odds is as *offers* to players (so that a DM offers a reward at some cost at some odds). It's usually up to the player if they choose to accept that offer (or should be). In our swinging chandelier incident, the offer might rightly be something equating to a power attack.

I wonder what the role of the player ought to be? Is the DMs responsibility to never offer unfair odds? When might it be okay to do so? Is the DM always required to know the odds, or do players bear some responsibility for that?


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## Hussar (May 26, 2020)

Heh.  Wasn't quick enough with my edit.  Yeah, that should be 4x damage, not 8x.    I hate math.

If the DM is offering unfair odds, in a game, then, IMO, that should be something very rare.  And, frankly, if the odds are unfair, then the player probably shouldn't do it.

But, yes, you are totally right that it's not a straight line relationship.  It's far, far more complex than my example.  Totally agree.


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## CapnZapp (May 26, 2020)

prabe said:


> Related: If the game's math is broken, and you're not a math person, you won't know why the game isn't working the way you expect and you won't have a prayer of fixing it.



Sure.

As long as you aren't saying this to argue games don't have to have sound math, okay. _Edit:_ which does not have to be true, either for you or the other poster.


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## clearstream (May 26, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Heh.  Wasn't quick enough with my edit.  Yeah, that should be 4x damage, not 8x.    I hate math.
> 
> If the DM is offering unfair odds, in a game, then, IMO, that should be something very rare.  And, frankly, if the odds are unfair, then the player probably shouldn't do it.
> 
> But, yes, you are totally right that it's not a straight line relationship.  It's far, far more complex than my example.  Totally agree.



I'd argue that the odds should almost always be marginally unfair 

But to your point, it seems like a DM should have a decent sense of what they are offering, and should not persistently offer unfair odds. What is unfair? That might be defined as when whatever is at stake against whatever is rewarded, multiplied by the odds, trends strongly towards lossiness. Players get much less out than they put in.

There is the matter of how obvious the risks are, but there I am suggesting that what is at issue there is not unfairness at all. The DM does not have sole responsibility for sizing or even necessarily elucidating risks. The riskiest risks are those that have obscured components!


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## prabe (May 26, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> Sure.
> 
> As long as you aren't saying this to argue games don't have to have sound math, okay. _Edit:_ which does not have to be true, either for you or the other poster.




The opposite of that.  I agree with you that games need sound math. I was speaking as an English major who loves rules-tinkering and occasionally gets in over his head and/or runs headlong into unanticipated outcomes.


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## Fenris-77 (May 26, 2020)

I think there are more ways of rewarding swinging from chandeliers than just additional damage. Assuming for a moment that you actually want your players doing heroic swashbuckling stuff like that in the first place, which admittedly may not be every campaign. Rewarding that sort of action with damage is .. um .. weird, to me anyway. But it should be rewarded, and in fact needs to be rewarded if I want to happen on a regular basis. My first instinct is to break the action down into less parts and generally be less punitive about overall chances of success. That allows me to scale down the reward. Second, I would probably grant rewards here that lie outside the RAW. I really like some version of Inspiration here, but buffed enough that it's a more tangible reward, maybe closer to the utility of a FATE point. Not everyone wants to add mechanics though. Another option is to link actions outside attack/damage with results that are also outside attack/damage. To keep the swashbuckling example, lets say you want to kick the Cardinal's guards down the stairs they just came up. That's a pretty standard swashbuckle right? If I dip into the damage rules to adjudicate that, I kind of need to stay inside the damage rules, which have pretty strict rules for things like knockback and prone and whatever. But, if the action is adjudicated as a simple cause/effect, for example, _I want to swing from the chandelier and knock the guards down the stairs_, then I can just give it a DC and roll with the narrative. 

I guess what I'm getting at is that it's way easier to keep risk and reward balanced when you keep the attached mechanic simple. Lots of DMs don;t really think about the actual math behind asking for a series of checks though, and I think that does serve to keep PCs action choice very much inside the box.


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## prabe (May 26, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> I think there are more ways of rewarding swinging from chandeliers than just additional damage. Assuming for a moment that you actually want your players doing heroic swashbuckling stuff like that in the first place, which admittedly may not be every campaign. Rewarding that sort of action with damage is .. um .. weird, to me anyway. But it should be rewarded, and in fact needs to be rewarded if I want to happen on a regular basis. My first instinct is to break the action down into less parts and generally be less punitive about overall chances of success. That allows me to scale down the reward. Second, I would probably grant rewards here that lie outside the RAW. I really like some version of Inspiration here, but buffed enough that it's a more tangible reward, maybe closer to the utility of a FATE point. Not everyone wants to add mechanics though. Another option is to link actions outside attack/damage with results that are also outside attack/damage. To keep the swashbuckling example, lets say you want to kick the Cardinal's guards down the stairs they just came up. That's a pretty standard swashbuckle right? If I dip into the damage rules to adjudicate that, I kind of need to stay inside the damage rules, which have pretty strict rules for things like knockback and prone and whatever. But, if the action is adjudicated as a simple cause/effect, for example, _I want to swing from the chandelier and knock the guards down the stairs_, then I can just give it a DC and roll with the narrative.
> 
> I guess what I'm getting at is that it's way easier to keep risk and reward balanced when you keep the attached mechanic simple. Lots of DMs don;t really think about the actual math behind asking for a series of checks though, and I think that does serve to keep PCs action choice very much inside the box.




If it's being used as an attack, I'm thinking something like Advantage on that attack, and probably something to reflect severely wrong-footing the enemy like the enemy are surprised for a round. In the instance of kicking them down the stairs ... Advantage on the attacker's roll to shove, Disadvantage on the defenders' rolls to resist (and allow the attacker to affect more than one enemy at once--it's cinematic!). There's plenty of flexibility in the system for stuff like that, if the DM can think at off-angles. It's a little harder for some (especially players), because there's so little explicit player-facing text to let them get a decent picture of their chances.


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## Fenris-77 (May 26, 2020)

prabe said:


> If it's being used as an attack, I'm thinking something like Advantage on that attack, and probably something to reflect severely wrong-footing the enemy like the enemy are surprised for a round. In the instance of kicking them down the stairs ... Advantage on the attacker's roll to shove, Disadvantage on the defenders' rolls to resist (and allow the attacker to affect more than one enemy at once--it's cinematic!). There's plenty of flexibility in the system for stuff like that, if the DM can think at off-angles. It's a little harder for some (especially players), because there's so little explicit player-facing text to let them get a decent picture of their chances.



I tend to use the, admittedly somewhat arbitrary, break point of 'does it do damage'. If all you're doing is kicking the guards down the stairs, i.e. they aren't taking HP damage, then I feel well justified adjudicating it outside the combat rules. You certainly can adjudicate it inside the combat rules and still have it be cinematic though, for sure. You'll notice your example also escapes the _three rolls to succeed_ model presented above? That's really the key. Make it one roll, however you're doing it, and it becomes a more approachable idea, and the math is less likely to get on top of you.

Something that can be an important decision point here for the DM is the roll for initiative. Unlike the rest of the game, D&D has that very specific indicator that the game is NOW IN COMBAT MODE. _Dun-dun-daaah!!_ Once you roll initiative expectations change a little. The stair kicking example is one I might allow as an action in response to my stating _two guards appear at the top of the stairs_. An action to delay or obstruct those guards doesn't have to happen after initiative is rolled. The stair kick, or throwing a table, or pulling down a tapestry, all those things can be resolved outside combat without breaking the game. That's part of why damage is my break point. It's really about the goal of the action. If the goal is to kick the guards down the stairs so that your escape attempt can continue, then rolling initiative just gums things up. I'd allow the action, and if it failed, then we're in combat. However, if the goal of kicking the guards down the stairs is to injure them, then it seems like a roll initiative and enter combat kind of idea.

I think your last sentence is really important. The players need to have some idea of how their swashbuckle may work, or they simply won't attempt it, or even suggest it. I think that the production of some player facing text might be necessary. Even a discussion in session zero about that sort of thing, where the DM sets some limits and manages expectations, could help. I prefer something more concrete though.


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## prabe (May 26, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> I tend to use the, admittedly somewhat arbitrary, break point of 'does it do damage'. If all you're doing is kicking the guards down the stairs, i.e. they aren't taking HP damage, then I feel well justified adjudicating it outside the combat rules. You certainly can adjudicate it inside the combat rules and still have it be cinematic though, for sure. You'll notice your example also escapes the _three rolls to succeed_ model presented above? That's really the key. Make it one roll, however you're doing it, and it becomes a more approachable idea, and the math is less likely to get on top of you.




To be honest, I was thinking a roll to Do the Chandelier Thing (probably the player's choice of STR or DEX, Athletics or Acrobatics), with the upside as described and the downside of ... falling damage? clinging to the chandelier as it swings 20' over the floor and the people on the floor start loading crossbows? dunno. It's still (really) one roll for the stunt itself modifying other rolls, but I concur that it's not so many as to ensure failure.



Fenris-77 said:


> I think your last sentence is really important. The players need to have some idea of how their swashbuckle may work, or they simply won't attempt it, or even suggest it. I think that the production of some player facing text might be necessary. Even a discussion in session zero about that sort of thing, where the DM sets some limits and manages expectations, could help. I prefer something more concrete though.




Yeah. The players should know if the GM intends to reward that sort of creativity. I don't think that way much as a player, but I'd like to think I'm willing to work with a player who does.


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## clearstream (May 26, 2020)

prabe said:


> If it's being used as an attack, I'm thinking something like Advantage on that attack, and probably something to reflect severely wrong-footing the enemy like the enemy are surprised for a round. In the instance of kicking them down the stairs ... Advantage on the attacker's roll to shove, Disadvantage on the defenders' rolls to resist (and allow the attacker to affect more than one enemy at once--it's cinematic!). There's plenty of flexibility in the system for stuff like that, if the DM can think at off-angles. It's a little harder for some (especially players), because there's so little explicit player-facing text to let them get a decent picture of their chances.



Well, I'm pretty sure @Hussar was not heavily committed to the example, but FWIW I like this more than damage and I think it points to how one can always simplify an ad-hoc mechanic. Grant a benefit and perhaps call for an acrobatics roll to land safely, or let the attack or special melee roll itself speak to that.


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## Hussar (May 26, 2020)

Yes, it's not good to dive too deeply into the example.  I was just illustrating, not trying to create an axiom.

And, yes, I think the point is very well made - the reward has to equate with the chance of failure.  Note, that's not exactly the same as risk because risk can also entail adding additional effects on failure, such as "land safely".  

But, again, if we're now adding negative consequences in addition to increased chances of failure, then the reward also needs to be increased as well.  Say, sure, it's only one Acrobatics check to swing from the chandelier, but, if you fail, you land prone, then how much, in addition to allowing the attack, do we have to reward the player in order to entice them to actually do it?

Again, if the risk:reward calculation is worse than simply engaging in rules sanctioned actions, then a rational player won't do it.  It's a bad idea for the player to do it.  This is not an easy calculation to do.


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## billd91 (May 27, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Again, if the risk:reward calculation is worse than simply engaging in rules sanctioned actions, then a rational player won't do it.  It's a bad idea for the player to do it.  This is not an easy calculation to do.




As long as you’re not stacking on lots of chances for it to fail by requiring too many skill checks, I’m not sure the risk:reward calculation needs to be too big a deal, particularly if you think relatively small and simple. Wanna swing from the chandelier to attack? Give me a DC 15 Dex (Acrobatics) check - if you succeed, you get advantage on the attack (which for a rogue implies SO much more), fail and you attack with disadvantage. 
Life‘s easier if you just keep things simple.


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## prabe (May 27, 2020)

billd91 said:


> As long as you’re not stacking on lots of chances for it to fail by requiring too many skill checks, I’m not sure the risk:reward calculation needs to be too big a deal, particularly if you think relatively small and simple. Wanna swing from the chandelier to attack? Give me a DC 15 Dex (Acrobatics) check - if you succeed, you get advantage on the attack (which for a rogue implies SO much more), fail and you attack with disadvantage.
> Life‘s easier if you just keep things simple.




I might let someone make a STR (Athletics) check to accomplish the same aim--but otherwise I agree.


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## aramis erak (May 27, 2020)

clearstream said:


> It seems like the purpose of dice pools might be exactly contrary to the assumptions of the OP, whose analysis appears built upon a notion that players should, and need to, know their odds. The question it makes me ask is, why? Why does it really matter that players know their odds? I could come back with a notion that they should _not_ know their odds, but only when their chances are improved or worsened, and when they are stronger or weaker. I could even think that knowing the odds in any exact sense is a chimera.



The first few dicepool-count-successes I encountered (Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader, Space 1889, Shadowrun, VTM 1E) were all using them as skill dice vs difficulty number. WH40K:RT and WHFB used tables to hide the difficulty calc, but many players intuited it. Space 1889 was co-released with a pair of minis games (and a hexmap version of one of them), and the combat mechanics are pretty close between them. Shadowrun and VTM are  just a bit after as S:1889, and I know the guys at FASA knew Frank Chadwick of GDW... because we see the FASA guys in the credits of many Traveller products. 

While the probabilities are a bit opaque, the intent stated by Frank (in _Space: 1889_) was to keep it compatible with the minis games and board game. It's a standard of minis games to roll a pool vs a fixed TN by die to resolve a unit-on-unit action, and so the combat systems in the RPG are exactly the same as in the other games.

(This same rationale is apparently why the various mechwarrior games do math to make the RPG rolls 2d6 roll high against a TN by skill, where the skill goes down as the character improves... it's because BattleTech does that.)

It's worth noting as well: Chainmail also used a pool of dice vs a TN matrix of Attacking troop type by Defending troop type....  indicating both how many men per die, and the individual results on the d6 which are needed to kill one target. This is fairly standard stuff in minis games. It reentering in the late 80's after TSR abandoned it in 1977... almost an inevitability. And the D&D minis rules in Dragon E-Zine use it, as well...



clearstream said:


> The OP offers a one-dimensional analysis of the subject, notwithstanding that I appreciate the thought and effort in writing, and that it has prompted an interesting discussion.



I don't agree that there's evidence of effort in writing. I do agree that the resulting discussions are worthwhile. I'd concede that some effort may have been made to find a controversial subject.

I also agree that knowing the odds really isn't always a good thing from a story standpoint. There are times when it's great, and times when it's not so great.


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## clearstream (May 27, 2020)

Hussar said:


> But, again, if we're now adding negative consequences in addition to increased chances of failure, then the reward also needs to be increased as well.  Say, sure, it's only one Acrobatics check to swing from the chandelier, but, if you fail, you land prone, then how much, in addition to allowing the attack, do we have to reward the player in order to entice them to actually do it?



I think a DM should include and permit players to make bad wagers. Imagine four worlds

*a) Using chandeliers pays out better. *Outcome = always use them. There is no interesting choice here, and narratively it will become repetitive.

*b) Using chandeliers pays out fairly.* Outcome = it is a matter of style, but you might as well always use them. The player takes no real risk and gains cachet.

*c) Using chandeliers pays out differently.* Outcome = it is a matter of circumstance. In the right circumstance, always use them.

*d) Using chandeliers pays out badly. *Outcome should be = avoid using them. There are a few ways it could still be desirable. Say it is crucial that the BBEG goes down this round. It can be worth the penalties just to have whatever unfairly meagre bonus the DM has put on offer. Or say a player just wants to look flashy. As hinted at in b), looking flashy has worth on the social and narrative dimensions of play. Just because that worth isn't measurable in game doesn't mean that it isn't on offer.

The reason why swinging on a chandelier is exciting is because it is flashy and inefficient. Taking Suits' definition as admonishment, it is a "_voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles_" where less efficient rather than more efficient means are adopted. It is the very heart of play! Games are played for stakes, and the most significant stakes are those outside the circle of play: in the stories we create. The sweet spot might well be exactly where the odds are rationally dislikeable... if I can pull that off I'm going to feel something that I could never feel otherwise!


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## clearstream (May 27, 2020)

aramis erak said:


> The first few dicepool-count-successes I encountered (Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader, Space 1889, Shadowrun, VTM 1E) were all using them as skill dice vs difficulty number. WH40K:RT and WHFB used tables to hide the difficulty calc, but many players intuited it. Space 1889 was co-released with a pair of minis games (and a hexmap version of one of them), and the combat mechanics are pretty close between them. Shadowrun and VTM are  just a bit after as S:1889, and I know the guys at FASA knew Frank Chadwick of GDW... because we see the FASA guys in the credits of many Traveller products.



Now that you draw my attention to it, I find it plausible that dice pools have such origins. As you suggest, to see games like 40K with their handfuls of dice generated by figures provides us with some solid examples.



aramis erak said:


> I don't agree that there's evidence of effort in writing. I do agree that the resulting discussions are worthwhile. I'd concede that some effort may have been made to find a controversial subject.



I have so far found this series pretty surprising in that treatment of the material seems very light. Where success is required on every trial a DM can simply multiply, but a DM is seldom in that world. A more common case - combat - sees players looking for X successes in less than Y trials (where at Y they will be dead). A take-away from compounding odds applies to some instances of skill use, and could help DMs better understand why stealth rolls should be let ride until broken. So there's that.

Maybe finding the subject has been the key thing. And FTM maybe the depth explored is chosen for an audience? I mean, why go into deeper discussion of game design when that might not be of interest to everyone?


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## Hussar (May 28, 2020)

billd91 said:


> As long as you’re not stacking on lots of chances for it to fail by requiring too many skill checks, I’m not sure the risk:reward calculation needs to be too big a deal, particularly if you think relatively small and simple. Wanna swing from the chandelier to attack? Give me a DC 15 Dex (Acrobatics) check - if you succeed, you get advantage on the attack (which for a rogue implies SO much more), fail and you attack with disadvantage.
> Life‘s easier if you just keep things simple.




Ok, let's presume, for a moment, that we're talking around a 5th-8th level game.  Fairly bog standard as things go.  So, barring the rogue with expertise or some sort of magic item or whatnot, by and large, a character is going to have about a +7 (ish) Acrobatics check.  (Yeah, 20 Dex and proficiency gives us, what, +9? +10?, so, let's benchmark it at +7)  So, a DC 15 check means that I have a 60% chance of success.  And success effectively gives me +5 on my attack.  However, I still fail 40% of the time and that gives me a -5 (effectively) on my attack.  Is this actually a balanced risk:reward?  Honestly, yeah, it's probably close enough that it's not too bad.  

OTOH, with a DC of 15, that basically means that any character not proficient shouldn't even consider trying.  So, where do we set the bar?  See, 5e describes DC 15 as Moderate.  Is that where we want to benchmark?  Or, do we want everyone to give it a go, but, those with proficiency are actually better at it?  That's obviously going to depend a lot on what kind of campaign we're going for.  In my Ghosts of Saltmarsh game, which is supposed to be swashbuckling, rollicking adventure, then, probably, the DC would be better set at about 10 so, everyone gets a shot at trying this but, those that are acrobaticly leaning can try it with a fair certainty (although, still not automatic) of success.  

I guess, the point I'm trying to make here is that context matters.  A lot.  Many DM's, IMO are going to set DC's higher than maybe they should.  I've seen people set this DC as high as 20 in other conversations.  Or, increase the penalty for failure- failed check means no attack at all and you fall prone.  Things like that.  @Bill91's example is probably pretty good, honestly, depending on what feel you are going for.  But, IMO, it's better to err on the side of easier, than harder.


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## Hussar (May 28, 2020)

Now, here I do disagree somewhat.



clearstream said:


> I think a DM should include and permit players to make bad wagers. Imagine four worlds
> 
> *a) Using chandeliers pays out better. *Outcome = always use them. There is no interesting choice here, and narratively it will become repetitive.




Maybe.  Depends on the penalty.  Players are often very, very risk averse and what you might think of as a better payout, still carries the risk of failure and thus the penalty.  Unless, of course, we're talking about a better pay out that is SO good that it would be stupid not to take it.  Obviously, that's bad too.  Generally speaking though, it's very rare that this happens.



> *b) Using chandeliers pays out fairly.* Outcome = it is a matter of style, but you might as well always use them. The player takes no real risk and gains cachet.
> 
> *c) Using chandeliers pays out differently.* Outcome = it is a matter of circumstance. In the right circumstance, always use them.




"Fairly" is a very nebulous idea.  And, what is "fair" will vary a lot from table to table and game to game.  Honestly, for me, so long as it's in this ballpark though, we're probably doing the right thing as a DM.



> *d) Using chandeliers pays out badly. *Outcome should be = avoid using them. There are a few ways it could still be desirable. Say it is crucial that the BBEG goes down this round. It can be worth the penalties just to have whatever unfairly meagre bonus the DM has put on offer. Or say a player just wants to look flashy. As hinted at in b), looking flashy has worth on the social and narrative dimensions of play. Just because that worth isn't measurable in game doesn't mean that it isn't on offer.




To me, though, this is just bad game design.  It's not rewarding smart play.  The smart play would be to not do this since the payout isn't worth the risk.  If it does succeed, well, it's just luck, not skill or particularly good play on the part of the player.  Yay, you rolled a high number!!  And, since the player will almost certainly fail, and failure in this case is probably catastrophic - as in whatever the player was trying to do is no longer possible anymore (the guards are alerted, the bad guy escapes, whatever) it's pretty much a suckers bet.  Really, it's the DM forcing outcomes on the table.  "I don't want the players to do X, but, if I outright say no, then I'm a railroading DM and that's bad.  So, instead, I'll give them a slim chance of success and when that fails, everyone's happy."

I really, really don't like this approach.



> The reason why swinging on a chandelier is exciting is because it is flashy and inefficient. Taking Suits' definition as admonishment, it is a "_voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles_" where less efficient rather than more efficient means are adopted. It is the very heart of play! Games are played for stakes, and the most significant stakes are those outside the circle of play: in the stories we create. The sweet spot might well be exactly where the odds are rationally dislikeable... if I can pull that off I'm going to feel something that I could never feel otherwise!




However, "Pull that off" doesn't require the odds to be so bad that failure is the most likely result.  There's a reason 5e has gone with bounded accuracy.  It's a lot more fun to hit things than have multiple rounds of whiffing.  Setting the PC up to whiff the attempt typically doesn't lead to interesting stories.  It leads to player frustration and then the player never attempting anything that's not rules defined afterward.  If outside of rules defined actions fail more often than rules defined actions, then it's perfectly rational NOT to attempt actions outside of rules definitions.  

Heck, there's a reason you see players who would rather start dropping spells rather than attempt anything with skills.  Spells have concrete, defined effects.  Skills are timey wimey vague bundles of possibilities.  Why bother with a disguise when a Change Self spell is so much better?  Why bother trying to sneak when Pass Without a Trace means the entire party sneaks pretty much automatically?  That sort of thing.


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## clearstream (May 28, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Maybe.  Depends on the penalty.  Players are often very, very risk averse and what you might think of as a better payout, still carries the risk of failure and thus the penalty.  Unless, of course, we're talking about a better pay out that is SO good that it would be stupid not to take it.  Obviously, that's bad too.  Generally speaking though, it's very rare that this happens.



I mean that it pays out better. There is no risk. A bonus without any penalties, for example.



Hussar said:


> "Fairly" is a very nebulous idea.  And, what is "fair" will vary a lot from table to table and game to game.  Honestly, for me, so long as it's in this ballpark though, we're probably doing the right thing as a DM.



This seems to quibble definitions, which isn't what we are about here. Speaking to your earlier example, fair would be where any penalty is balanced by gains in proportion. The expectation over time is undifferentiated for using chandeliers.



Hussar said:


> To me, though, this is just bad game design.  It's not rewarding smart play.  The smart play would be to not do this since the payout isn't worth the risk.  If it does succeed, well, it's just luck, not skill or particularly good play on the part of the player.  Yay, you rolled a high number!!  And, since the player will almost certainly fail, and failure in this case is probably catastrophic - as in whatever the player was trying to do is no longer possible anymore (the guards are alerted, the bad guy escapes, whatever) it's pretty much a suckers bet.  Really, it's the DM forcing outcomes on the table.  "I don't want the players to do X, but, if I outright say no, then I'm a railroading DM and that's bad.  So, instead, I'll give them a slim chance of success and when that fails, everyone's happy."



Were it the only option available to players then it would be railroading, but where do we say that? In any circumstance there are a number of - let's call them - *offers* that a DM expresses to players or will express if asked. So players have before them an array of _offers_. The least number in your example was three: use the chandelier, use a normal attack action, do nothing. It's up to them which offer they avail themselves of. Remember though that the rational player you are advocating for must always accept the best offer: if that is chandelier, then it is _always _chandelier.

There's no reason why chandelier should be more or equally efficient to a normal attack. I think there are good reasons it should not be (else, if it is mechanically superior, and efficiency is the player's concern, then it should always be used). What I am saying is that players should not be focused on efficiency, and your concern overlooks the flipside of the OP's observations. The players will get multiple attempts. This won't be the last chandelier they ever see (well, unless it is literally the last chandelier they ever see... that can happen!) It might usually be a bad idea to chandelier, but sometimes circumstances demand risks be taken: the other characters are all down, one solid hit will drop the BBEG, one more round will see our heroine disintegrated.

Failing this time sets up next time to be that much more exciting. I think many DMs overlook this, but ask yourself a super-simple question: is a game more fun when players _always_ succeed? No chance of failure? No real risks? No losses?



Hussar said:


> Heck, there's a reason you see players who would rather start dropping spells rather than attempt anything with skills.  Spells have concrete, defined effects.  Skills are timey wimey vague bundles of possibilities.  Why bother with a disguise when a Change Self spell is so much better?  Why bother trying to sneak when Pass Without a Trace means the entire party sneaks pretty much automatically?  That sort of thing.



Are we are in a world where players must have certainty over outcome? Notionally, skill use is indefinitely repeatable and spell use is not. One consequence of 5e RAW at many tables is that spells are readily replenished. The issue there is not risks, it is that an intended cost turns out not to be a cost.


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## CodeFlayer (May 28, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> Sure.
> 
> As long as you aren't saying this to argue games don't have to have sound math, okay. _Edit:_ which does not have to be true, either for you or the other poster.



In most games, if there is a chandelier object, there are specific rules and appropriate math as needed, all covered by the rulebook. They are bounded environments. RPGs are something very different, open ended, by involving things and situations that cannot be anticipated with any certainty(unless it is a large red button that says 'press me'), and makes for much of the intrinsic fascination and enjoyment that RPGs give. Thus, I see it as the GMs role to craft something interesting in an exchange or two with the player for something like the chandelier gambit, and then accept how the dice fall (as outlined by another poster). When I wrote of taking control of the simulation, I was referring to things like death mechanics so that, with the tables permission before the fact, we can explore as group what we want to happen next. The player may want to move on to another archetype, or the table may want to try a different campaign.

I would opine that if a GM were to decide to fudge a die roll, then, they should never speak of it. It breaks the magic.


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## Fenris-77 (May 28, 2020)

Managing things like chandeliers in D&D is a little more complicated than in some other games (notably more fiction-first games) because of the D&D combat system. Well, to be more specific, the way the D&D combat system is usually implemented at the table. The underlying mechanics of D&D don't really differentiate between combat and non-combat as much as people think. Both are based on d20 rolls with bonuses for skill and rising difficulty targets. Combat obviously has a much more robust set of mechanisms for adjudicating the outcome of actions, but the basic principles are the same. The main difference is the initiative roll. Initiative serves to somewhat arbitrarily divide the set of all possible actions and I think this quite often restricts how both players and DMs think about what possible and how to adjudicate the outcome. 

I'll use a matched pair of examples to illustrate what I'm trying to say, and I'll stick with the chandelier swinging for both. So, example one, the character wants to leap from the balcony, swing from the chandelier over a group of the Duke's party guests, and knock over the burning brazier before the evil chancellor can drop poison into it and kill everyone at the ball with poisoned smoke. Fancy right? There are a ton of ways to adjudicate success and failure here, but the majority of them are going to involve one, or maybe two skill rolls. A swinging roll and a booting roll, or maybe even just a single roll for both. I don't think it's controversial to say this isn't hard for a DM to manage. Sometimes this shizz just writes itself. The action is cool, it moves the story forward, and it provides a wealth of hooks to complicate things in the event of failure - it's a pretty ideal role playing action. If I were adjudicating this, I probably wouldn't even make it all that hard. It's pretty fancy, so obviously there needs to be some chance for failure, but I wouldn't set the bar super high as I don't want to disincline the players from trying this stuff in the first place. Some GMs might opt for more rolls and higher DCs than I would, but I think those DMs are doing both their game and their player a disservice. On to example two.

So, in example two we're going to keep most of our moving parts, but change a couple of key things and take a look at how that changes adjudication. In this example, the character is trying to escape the duke's manor after being discovered ransacking the evil chancellor's office (looking for evidence of malfeasance, no doubt). The PC races out onto the same balcony, overlooking the same group of party guests, the burning brazier, and the evil chancellor twirling his villain mustache. The PC has discovered that the Chancellor's secretary is bringing the poison to the ball, and is in fact due to arrive any moment. And lo and behold, the Secretary appears at the top of the stairs leading up from the dungeon. The secretary cannot reach the brazier or chancellor or bad things will happen! Our swashbuckling PC announces that he's going to leap from the balcony, swing from the chandelier, and boot the secretary back down the stairs, preventing him from delivering his vile burden. Sweet! This is some real Dumas stuff, and as a DM I'm still excited, but this is where it start to fall apart in some games. The culprit is the initiative roll.

In our second example, the action has reached a decision point for the DM. The most common answer is this: What are we doing here? Well, we're booting the secretary down the stairs, so that's combat, so the answer is roll initiative, right? I'd argue that this is the wrong choice. Moving from narrative play to what I'll call combat play introduces a strict order of operations, and a bunch of mechanics, and that's the first stumbling block here. Now we have to figure out if the secretary is surprised, or not, and then we have to roll to see who goes first. If the secretary goes first the whole plan is in the cacky because he'll obviously move away from the top of the stairs. Here's my question, why ruin a perfectly good plan by adding an additional role that can only serve to add additional chances of failure? There are some additional problems as well, also introduced by the decision to roll initiative. Because we are now in combat mode, most DMs look in a different toolbox to decide how things go. Now we're talking about attack type, armor class, damage, and a much stricter set of rules about applying conditions like knock back. Maybe the secretary should get a Dex save to avoid the boot? Holy crizzap, entities are multiplying like coat hangers in a closet here. Now we're looking at a minimum of three rolls, initiative, one to swing and an attack roll, never mind a possible saving throw. Regardless of difficulties, this whole idea just got a lot more complicated and the chances of success went way down and the number of moving parts the DM has to consider went up. 

Obviously you can adjudicate the chandelier swing just fine within the combat rules, but you can't escape the extra failure state that comes with the initiative roll. A snazzy DM can probably navigate the additional rules layers without too much holdup or thought, but a new DM could get bogged down a little because the action in question doesn't really fit neatly into the combat rules, so there's also some potential lag while that DM crunches numbers in his head. Hitting the pause button before you call for the initiative roll creates a moment in the narrative, a moment within which you can still work outside the combat rules, and you can keep the narrative flowing. The PCs get a moment to opt in or out of combat, and a moment to act while they are still in charge of what happens next. That moment is a valuable tool, and a lot of DMs regularly miss it because they shout _Roll for initiaive!_ a beat too quickly.


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## billd91 (May 28, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> So, in example two we're going to keep most of our moving parts, but change a couple of key things and take a look at how that changes adjudication. In this example, the character is trying to escape the duke's manor after being discovered ransacking the evil chancellor's office (looking for evidence of malfeasance, no doubt). The PC races out onto the same balcony, overlooking the same group of party guests, the burning brazier, and the evil chancellor twirling his villain mustache. The PC has discovered that the Chancellor's secretary is bringing the poison to the ball, and is in fact due to arrive any moment. And lo and behold, the Secretary appears at the top of the stairs leading up from the dungeon. The secretary cannot reach the brazier or chancellor or bad things will happen! Our swashbuckling PC announces that he's going to leap from the balcony, swing from the chandelier, and boot the secretary back down the stairs, preventing him from delivering his vile burden. Sweet! This is some real Dumas stuff, and as a DM I'm still excited, but this is where it start to fall apart in some games. The culprit is the initiative roll.
> 
> In our second example, the action has reached a decision point for the DM. The most common answer is this: What are we doing here? Well, we're booting the secretary down the stairs, so that's combat, so the answer is roll initiative, right? I'd argue that this is the wrong choice. Moving from narrative play to what I'll call combat play introduces a strict order of operations, and a bunch of mechanics, and that's the first stumbling block here. Now we have to figure out if the secretary is surprised, or not, and then we have to roll to see who goes first. If the secretary goes first the whole plan is in the cacky because he'll obviously move away from the top of the stairs. Here's my question, why ruin a perfectly good plan by adding an additional role that can only serve to add additional chances of failure? There are some additional problems as well, also introduced by the decision to roll initiative. Because we are now in combat mode, most DMs look in a different toolbox to decide how things go. Now we're talking about attack type, armor class, damage, and a much stricter set of rules about applying conditions like knock back. Maybe the secretary should get a Dex save to avoid the boot? Holy crizzap, entities are multiplying like coat hangers in a closet here. Now we're looking at a minimum of three rolls, initiative, one to swing and an attack roll, never mind a possible saving throw. Regardless of difficulties, this whole idea just got a lot more complicated and the chances of success went way down and the number of moving parts the DM has to consider went up.
> 
> <snip>That moment is a valuable tool, and a lot of DMs regularly miss it because they shout _Roll for initiaive!_ a beat too quickly.




Honestly, I think you're fretting the initiative roll too much. Yes, there are all sorts of ways rolls can complicate things. But just because the roll indicates the secretary may go before the hero, that doesn't mean the hero's plan is squashed. After all, the whole point of swinging down from the balcony is intended to be a surprise, right? So that secretary is going to assume the hero will come down the normal way. He may spend his action, assuming he even sees the hero (which we'll assume he does otherwise we'd just be *giving* the hero the drop on him because of the surprise since the secretary is trying to look unrushed and nonchalant - all the better to poison a bunch of unsuspecting party-goers), catching the eye of any guards on the party level to send them up to stop the hero from using the stairs.

If you turn to initiative to help time out the adjudication of actions, you don't have to play it like everyone gets everything they want accomplished on their turns, particularly when the players are angling to do something surprising like swinging on a chandelier.
And that's one reason I think you don't want such tactics to be too common, even in a swashbuckling game. If the PCs are doing it all the time, it's no longer a surprise. And when it's no longer a surprise, why aren't people expecting it and countering it? By all means, if a PC is fishing around  for something in desperation like "Oh, my god! The secretary is coming into the ballroom with the poison. I gotta get down their fast!" let them know "Well, there's a chandelier hanging about midway between you and him..." But if the PC is known as a chandelier swinger, time to shake him out of his comfort zone and do something more creative.


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## Ulfgeir (May 28, 2020)

Another point is when you do skills. You might not want or need the exact value, but you should have a sense of degree of whether or not that is something you even have a remote chance of succeeding at. Especially if it is something that is part of your occupation.  

In D&D and similar games it will often be that unless you have maxed out your stat and skill-ranks for that skill, and you have a ton of magical items to help you, you have no chance of succeeding because you are too low level (unless you roll a natural 20, sometimes not even then), or some stuff that you cannot fail once you get your stats high enough. 

In D&D or BRP-based games it is relatively easy to have a sanity-check on your chances (That does not mean that the value you need to hit is anywhere near sane though). In a game like the FFG Star Wars or other games with pools, it is much more difficult.


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## Fenris-77 (May 28, 2020)

@billd91 - I'm not fretting initiative at all actually. Just identifying a couple of ideas about it that don't really get a lot of thought. One, the impact it has on action adjudication, which is often to introduce an additional chance of failure to many potential actions (not just furniture parkour). Two, the way it can take the agency out of the players' hands to move the action forward in a positive way. Initiative and combat aren't bad things at all, I'm just counselling a moment of reflection about exactly when to call for that initiative roll.

I completely agree that you don't always want people swinging from chandeliers. That reminds me of watching my kids play Minecraft. They jump everywhere because it's marginally faster than running (or at least that's what they said) but if looks goofy as all get out. My point wasn't to privilege chandelier antics, that was just the example. The idea of running away in the face of discovery is a more mundane example of the moment I'm talking about. You round the corner and see a pair of the chancellor's guards. One of them spots you, what do you do? I can handle that with the surprise rules and a initiative roll, and sometimes I might, but I can also wait a beat and let the player decide how to answer the question I posed. If he draws his blade we go to initiative and combat, but if his goal is to run away, why would I immediately complicate that by calling for initiative? I can, obviously, but at that point the call for initiative is a consequence, I'm making his goal more difficult, and if I'm going to do that I want to be doing it for a reason, not just because it seemed like the thing to do.


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## Hussar (May 29, 2020)

I guess I've never had the problem of someone stunting (chandelier swinging or whatnot) _too _often.  IME, the problem is the other way, where the players refuse to move outside of the clearly defined box and try anything creative.  So, on the occasions when players do try something funky, I now try to reward that as much as possible.

So, to use the swinging from the chandelier example one more time, I wouldn't really have a problem with simply saying, "DC 15 (or 10 maybe), you get advantage if you succeed" and no penalty at all for failure.  I WANT the players to always be looking for something more interesting than "I swing my lumpy metal thing", so, I feel that it's better to use the carrot a lot more than the stick.


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## clearstream (May 29, 2020)

Hussar said:


> So, to use the swinging from the chandelier example one more time, I wouldn't really have a problem with simply saying, "DC 15 (or 10 maybe), you get advantage if you succeed" and no penalty at all for failure.  I WANT the players to always be looking for something more interesting than "I swing my lumpy metal thing", so, I feel that it's better to use the carrot a lot more than the stick.



If a costless benefit is offered, then what the DM seems to be saying is she's going to reward players who put in the effort to choose entertaining actions. That can be a good thing, and can inadvertently penalise quieter players or those who might see such freebies as cheesy.

I think some DMs can carry off a style that would not work for other DMs. My style is harsh, but my players tell me that they enjoy it. For whatever reason, it works for me. A friend who DMs is an absolute master of the unexpected catch. As others have said in this thread, the right balance of risk and reward will vary from house to house. Maybe variety is what is most needed. Some offers are gimmes, others would only be grasped in desperation (or error).


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## Fenris-77 (May 29, 2020)

clearstream said:


> If a costless benefit is offered, then what the DM seems to be saying is she's going to reward players who put in the effort to choose entertaining actions. That can be a good thing, and can inadvertently penalise quieter players or those who might see such freebies as cheesy.



I think there's a balance that needs to be struck. You can reward inventive players without penalizing quieter players if the rewards for inventive play don't outweigh the more standard options in terms of effect. That sounds weird, but I'm coming at this from the position that inventive actions and play are often actually penalized, sometimes unwittingly, by DMs because of the string of rolls or DCs they put on those actions.


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## prabe (May 29, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> I think there's a balance that needs to be struck. You can reward inventive players without penalizing quieter players if the rewards for inventive play don't outweigh the more standard options in terms of effect. That sounds weird, but I'm coming at this from the position that inventive actions and play are often actually penalized, sometimes unwittingly, by DMs because of the string of rolls or DCs they put on those actions.




I think (and I don't think you're exactly saying otherwise here) that there's a difference between penalizing creative play by gating it behind super-high DCs or strings of rolls--effectively guaranteeing that it won't work--and penalizing *failure*. Sure, you can try to talk your way past the ogres munching their meal of winter-starved deer, but the failure mode there is your one character against four ogres with backup a couple-three rounds away; that's not the same thing as making you roll for CHA(Persuasion) for every round you spend talking to the ogres. It's not radically different from the idea of letting someone try to swing from the chandelier and having the failure mode be one of falling damage, clinging to the chandelier as it sways over the enemy, or missing the chandelier and being prone (IMO).


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## Fenris-77 (May 29, 2020)

prabe said:


> I think (and I don't think you're exactly saying otherwise here) that there's a difference between penalizing creative play by gating it behind super-high DCs or strings of rolls--effectively guaranteeing that it won't work--and penalizing *failure*. Sure, you can try to talk your way past the ogres munching their meal of winter-starved deer, but the failure mode there is your one character against four ogres with backup a couple-three rounds away; that's not the same thing as making you roll for CHA(Persuasion) for every round you spend talking to the ogres. It's not radically different from the idea of letting someone try to swing from the chandelier and having the failure mode be one of falling damage, clinging to the chandelier as it sways over the enemy, or missing the chandelier and being prone (IMO).



Yeah, for sure. The consequences of failure should be appropriate to the action. Swinging from a chandelier has a bunch of more interesting and potentially more dangerous failure states than swinging your sword. I definitively fall on the consequence side of things and not the gating side. I think players can get behind appropriate consequences more readily that strings of high DC rolls too, and that under those conditions will be more ready and willing to buckle a few swashes rather than coloring inside the lines all the time.


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## billd91 (May 29, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> Yeah, for sure. The consequences of failure should be appropriate to the action. Swinging from a chandelier has a bunch of more interesting and potentially more dangerous failure states than swinging your sword. I definitively fall on the consequence side of things and not the gating side. I think players can get behind appropriate consequences more readily that strings of high DC rolls too, and that under those conditions will be more ready and willing to buckle a few swashes rather than coloring inside the lines all the time.




Plus, swashbucklers don't always succeed even in the movies - and as long as the consequences are entertaining, it's still good. Just watch the early part of the 1973 film of *The Three Musketeers* for examples.


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## Fenris-77 (May 29, 2020)

billd91 said:


> Plus, swashbucklers don't always succeed even in the movies - and as long as the consequences are entertaining, it's still good. Just watch the early part of the 1973 film of *The Three Musketeers* for examples.



I think the failures are as cool as the successes. I can make a *lot *of hay out of a failed chandelier swing, and the results could raise the encounter from solid to legendary.


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## prabe (May 29, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> I think the failures are a cool as the successes. I can make a *lot *of hay out of a failed chandelier swing, and the results could raise the encounter from solid to legendary.




Yup. Failure doesn't mean "you lose the fight." It means "you'll have to win the fight some other way, but first ..."


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## Fenris-77 (May 29, 2020)

prabe said:


> Yup. Failure doesn't mean "you lose the fight." It means "you'll have to win the fight some other way, but first ..."



When I think of truly memorable encounters, and the equivalent scenes from movies, failure plays at least as important a role in those scenes as success does, if not a greater role. Complications make things interesting and memorable. Even John Wick gets shot and occasionally gets the crap beat out of him, or runs out of ammo. He's compelling because he keeps on ticking and finds a way to make things happen, not just because he's a giant sized badass.


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## Ulfgeir (May 29, 2020)

billd91 said:


> Plus, swashbucklers don't always succeed even in the movies - and as long as the consequences are entertaining, it's still good. Just watch the early part of the 1973 film of *The Three Musketeers* for examples.




Love that old movie.


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## CodeFlayer (May 29, 2020)

It is in my thoughts that often seemingly independent events are often the opposite. I have noticed that in the world of dubious undertakings, if it is well begun the odds of success seem to go up substantially. The only example I can think of is someone attempting to jump a canyon on a motorcycle. The quality of the take off seems to highly influence the odds of a good landing, but is no guarantee. A simple mechanic might be added to reflect this - if the first action is very successful (high roll), then perhaps it confers advantage on the next one in the event chain. I am a proponent of such dubious undertakings in RPGs - it is comedy gold!

In the matter of the chandelier, I was barely involved.


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## Fenris-77 (May 29, 2020)

CodeFlayer said:


> In the matter of the chandelier, I was barely involved.



If I, hypothetically, had pictures of the Chandelier Incident, _many_ pictures, how interested would you be, again hypothetically, in keeping those off social media? I take gems, gold and paypal.


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## Livemike (Jun 4, 2020)

Nagol said:


> It gets really bad when mechanics become opaque and improperly explained.  The original skill challenges in 4e were like this.  Markov chain probabilities are not obvious to most folk.  It was obvious when one did the math that the original designers hadn't.  And that's before the inclusion of auto-fail options in the scenario like the example SC had.  The odds of success without the DM doing something 'off-book' were terrible.




All TTRPGs should have what the numbers mean explained, including but not limited to skill ratings, character stats and difficulty ratings/modifiers.  That explaination has to include the probabilities of a character accomplishing something.  RPGs are languages and the maths is part of the definition of characters, situations and objects.  

Take the system I'm working on "Exceptional", what would it mean for a difficulty number to be 24?  Well the "Roll Base" table describes what numbers characters should have for particular ability levels.  An average person with a minimally trained skill has a base of 11 while someone with a good relevant stat and professional training has a base of 20.  The difficulty table gives an approximate probabilities for characters of various levels of ability.  Looking it up you see that DF 25 translates to about a 28% chance for Joe Average and 90% for the professional.  So you actually know what DF 25 means.  You know what having a skill total of 11 or 20 means.  Because I put it all the tables so people understand what's going on.  

If you just say "4 is a high skill" but don't explain what that means in terms of success chance you're not really translating the world into a language people understand.   Players shouldn't have to do the math, firstly because most don't want to and secondly because the designer ought to have done it himself.      If he hasn't then even he doesn't know what the world he's describing is like.  If plate mail gives a +3 to damage resistance does that mean it's really good or marginal?  If he hasn't had the math worked out he doesn't know.  If he has then he should write down so we don't have to repeat the work.


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## Livemike (Jun 4, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> Sorry, that's unconstructive and antagonistic to me.
> 
> You might find that changing your uncompromising stand makes more DMs willing to have you as a player.



It's entirely constructive to say "Your homebrew class doesn't work mathematically.".  DMs don't have the right to be sheilded from facts.  It's not antagonistic to say that the DM made a mistake in changing the rules in some way.  It would be different if it were a subjective thing, like how that particular fictional society works, there is no "mistake" there, just subjective difference.  But giving players a less powerful class is screwing them over.  If you created that class then it's your job to make it worthwhile.  You didn't have to homebrew and a player shouldn't have to choose between keeping a character and being significantly weaker than the other PCs.


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## Livemike (Jun 4, 2020)

clearstream said:


> I want to understand the motives for a thing in order to critique that thing. Thinking about dice pools, I can appreciate their tactile qualities - it's really pleasant to pick up a bunch of dice and roll them - and the way they push me toward an intuitive and approximate rather than analytical and exact idea of the odds. A long time ago, and ultimately unsuccessfully, I designed an RPG in which the dice represented spirits that players can use and exhaust; each having faces with unique numberings and additional game effects. There have of course been many other forays into this design space.
> 
> It seems like the purpose of dice pools might be exactly contrary to the assumptions of the OP, whose analysis appears built upon a notion that players should, and need to, know their odds. The question it makes me ask is, why? Why does it really matter that players know their odds? I could come back with a notion that they should _not_ know their odds, but only when their chances are improved or worsened, and when they are stronger or weaker. I could even think that knowing the odds in any exact sense is a chimera.
> 
> Not that I am not defending any specific position here. I'm digging into when and why one might _not_ want to know the odds. The OP offers a one-dimensional analysis of the subject, notwithstanding that I appreciate the thought and effort in writing, and that it has prompted an interesting discussion.



Yes they should know the odds, at least approximately and unless there's a factor the PCs are unaware of.  If you don't know how likely a character is to be able to do something you don't really know that character.  Imagine if you were given a level 1  ranger to play and there's an opportunity to track something or try something else.  What is the chance you'll be able to successfully track?  If you don't know you don't know if your character is at one with the forest or a noob who can barely follow a trail.  The PC would know this.  They know if they're capable of doing something.  There might be circumstances where things are harder or easier than they appear but unless your character took "Dunning-Kreuger" as a disadvantage they should generally know how good they are.  Otherwise every choice you make is a pure guess at what would be realistic in the circumstances, which isn't realistic.  Mages know if they can cast a spell.  Warriors know if they can do a headshot at 100 paces.  Theives know if they can climb a wall.  A player should be able to know it to, or he's not playing his character.


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## clearstream (Jun 4, 2020)

Livemike said:


> Yes they should know the odds, at least approximately and unless there's a factor the PCs are unaware of.  If you don't know how likely a character is to be able to do something you don't really know that character.



I don't know how likely I am to do something, and yet I think I know myself at least as well as I know a character I am playing. On the other hand, our RPG world is kind of flattened - it is a simplified or precised version of reality - the numbers work as a kind of shorthand for the lived knowledge we of course have: I imagine that might be in the direction of your thought here? I feel like a DM can have divers ends, and those ends might not always call for precision.



Livemike said:


> Imagine if you were given a level 1  ranger to play and there's an opportunity to track something or try something else.  What is the chance you'll be able to successfully track?  If you don't know you don't know if your character is at one with the forest or a noob who can barely follow a trail.  The PC would know this. They know if they're capable of doing something.



The ranger can know those things without knowing the exact numbers. They can know they are at one with the forest. They know they are capable of following the trail and - compared with others - very likely to do so. Dice pools can be good at suggesting skill level... simply, I roll more dice thus I am better.



Livemike said:


> There might be circumstances where things are harder or easier than they appear but unless your character took "Dunning-Kreuger" as a disadvantage they should generally know how good they are.  Otherwise every choice you make is a pure guess at what would be realistic in the circumstances, which isn't realistic.  Mages know if they can cast a spell.  Warriors know if they can do a headshot at 100 paces.  Theives know if they can climb a wall.  A player should be able to know it to, or he's not playing his character.



Under circumstances, maybe you might be thinking of cases like contests or DCs where the target should be unknown, so things are harder or easier than they appear. A point I am making is that knowing you are good, and knowing the precise probability, really are separate concerns. In DragonQuest there was a spell - Whitefire - that even a great caster would have only a few percent chance of casting. On the other hand, a 90% chance of walking successfully is not really that good. These things are relative: knowing the numbers won't necessarily narrate that to you... or at least, is not the only means of doing so.


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## CapnZapp (Jun 4, 2020)

Livemike said:


> It's entirely constructive to say "Your homebrew class doesn't work mathematically.".  DMs don't have the right to be sheilded from facts.  It's not antagonistic to say that the DM made a mistake in changing the rules in some way.  It would be different if it were a subjective thing, like how that particular fictional society works, there is no "mistake" there, just subjective difference.  But giving players a less powerful class is screwing them over.  If you created that class then it's your job to make it worthwhile.  You didn't have to homebrew and a player shouldn't have to choose between keeping a character and being significantly weaker than the other PCs.



I see no reason to rehash this issue. 

Some GMs aren't as mathematically gifted as you might be, and besides, if I had a nickle for every time someone said "it doesn't work mathematically" when they meant "I can't get the powerups I want" I would probably be able to buy a coffee.


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## Hussar (Jun 4, 2020)

CapnZapp said:


> I see no reason to rehash this issue.
> 
> Some GMs aren't as mathematically gifted as you might be, and besides, if I had a nickle for every time someone said "it doesn't work mathematically" when they meant "I can't get the powerups I want" I would probably be able to buy a coffee.



I would say that it's rather equally antagonistic to presume that the player is simply power gaming instead of honestly evaluating the math.  Doubly so if the GM isn't as mathematically gifted.

Note, this little sidebar started with me telling an anecdote where I actually tracked the math for dozens of rounds of combat before the DM would accept that the math was off.  As a player, it's a good idea to have a LOT of evidence on your side before talking to your DM, because, well, as @CapnZapp here nicely demonstrates, DM ego tends to be a much larger issue in these conversations than anyone's actual math abilities.


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## Fenris-77 (Jun 5, 2020)

Hussar said:


> I would say that it's rather equally antagonistic to presume that the player is simply power gaming instead of honestly evaluating the math.  Doubly so if the GM isn't as mathematically gifted.
> 
> Note, this little sidebar started with me telling an anecdote where I actually tracked the math for dozens of rounds of combat before the DM would accept that the math was off.  As a player, it's a good idea to have a LOT of evidence on your side before talking to your DM, because, well, as @CapnZapp here nicely demonstrates, DM ego tends to be a much larger issue in these conversations than anyone's actual math abilities.



Is it not also pretty antagonistic to assume that DM ego is going to be a regular barrier to service? I'm not sure that's any more likely or common than the powergaming comment you're responding to, and that example is actually _really_ common. Generally speaking, someone who is going to analyze the math underlying a class is doing so to see how 'powerful' it is. That's my experience anyway. Some of those people aren't making choices based on that power level (like you), but lots are.

I'll say this though. Anyone who writes a class and puts it into play without playtesting is definitely asking for trouble, one way or another.


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## Hussar (Jun 6, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> Is it not also pretty antagonistic to assume that DM ego is going to be a regular barrier to service? I'm not sure that's any more likely or common than the powergaming comment you're responding to, and that example is actually _really_ common. Generally speaking, someone who is going to analyze the math underlying a class is doing so to see how 'powerful' it is. That's my experience anyway. Some of those people aren't making choices based on that power level (like you), but lots are.
> 
> I'll say this though. Anyone who writes a class and puts it into play without playtesting is definitely asking for trouble, one way or another.




That's pretty much the point I was trying to make.  Ego on either side of the screen is a problem.  If someone isn't very good at math, then, well, maybe homebrewing a class is a bad idea.  But, if someone isn't very good at math AND they refuse to accept other people doing the math for them, well, that's just a recipe for disaster.

The whole point of analyzing the math is to determine if something is balanced or not.


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## Fenris-77 (Jun 6, 2020)

Hussar said:


> That's pretty much the point I was trying to make.  Ego on either side of the screen is a problem.  If someone isn't very good at math, then, well, maybe homebrewing a class is a bad idea.  But, if someone isn't very good at math AND they refuse to accept other people doing the math for them, well, that's just a recipe for disaster.
> 
> The whole point of analyzing the math is to determine if something is balanced or not.



That's fair, I wasn't quite sure from your post if that was the goal. My point about a certain kind of 'math-y' player stands though, some of those guys are all about optimization, and their critique of a homebrew class is going to be colored by their preoccupation with white room stats crunching and what the 'best' option is. We all know a guy or two like that.


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## Hussar (Jun 6, 2020)

Fenris-77 said:


> That's fair, I wasn't quite sure from your post if that was the goal. My point about a certain kind of 'math-y' player stands though, some of those guys are all about optimization, and their critique of a homebrew class is going to be colored by their preoccupation with white room stats crunching and what the 'best' option is. We all know a guy or two like that.




Oh, for sure.  Honestly, the best solution I've found is, if you have to talk to your DM about the math of the game, spend some time actually gathering data from the game.  If you think this character is over or under powered, either way, track it for a couple of sessions.  That way you can show, rather than tell, which, as you say, tends to run into white room theory crafting territory.


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## pnewman (Aug 15, 2020)

Hussar said:


> The reward in a game MUST reflect the risk.  And this is something that you see over and over again that DM's just don't grasp.




No, the risk should reflect the plausible risk. Robbing a (US) bank is harder than it was 80 years ago. Not getting caught after you leave is also harder. The reward from doing so is less than it was 80 years ago because cash is not as important as it used to be (and maybe because inflation has made "as much cash as you can even carry" have less value).

This does not mean that the GM of a bank robbing game set in 2020 is being unfair compared to the GM of a bank robbing game set in 1940. It means the world has changed.


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## Hussar (Aug 15, 2020)

pnewman said:


> No, the risk should reflect the plausible risk. Robbing a (US) bank is harder than it was 80 years ago. Not getting caught after you leave is also harder. The reward from doing so is less than it was 80 years ago because cash is not as important as it used to be (and maybe because inflation has made "as much cash as you can even carry" have less value).
> 
> This does not mean that the GM of a bank robbing game set in 2020 is being unfair compared to the GM of a bank robbing game set in 1940. It means the world has changed.




To be fair here, you are presenting an entire game, whereas I'm talking about a single element.  

But, at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter.  If the reward of a random function of the game (note, this isn't really your example since you could play a bank robbing game with zero random functions) is less than the risk for attempting that random function, then any rational player will not take that risk unless forced to.  

Your character has a magic weapon.  33% of the time, it will instantly kill anything you hit with it.  But, 66% of the time, it will backfire and instantly kill your character.  Would you use it?  Of course not.  There are all sorts of other means of killing an enemy, that carry far, far less than a 2 in 3 chance of your character dying.  

The problem is, many people have very poor senses when it comes to calculating odds and many DM's don't want to make it "too easy".


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## aramis erak (Aug 15, 2020)

Hussar said:


> Your character has a magic weapon.  33% of the time, it will instantly kill anything you hit with it.  But, 66% of the time, it will backfire and instantly kill your character.  Would you use it?  Of course not.  There are all sorts of other means of killing an enemy, that carry far, far less than a 2 in 3 chance of your character dying.



To be fair, whether or not you'd know is more important than the actual odds. If you have no way of knowing the odds, but just know it's a magic sword, you use it when you think you need a magic sword... it's your buddies who have a chance of knowing... after you off yourself.

Also to be fair, such a magic item is a Gygaxian F**-the-players d**-move, and it's inclusion in game is grounds for sane players to vote the GM out... it's the kind of thing that, when it happens in the game, it's time to find a new group.

Mr. Newman's assertion boils down to "you can't judge difficulties for historic or fantasy based upon current difficulties, because the paradigms and tech are quite different." If I understand his argument correctly (and I've gamed with him for many years, and been friends for many more), if the GM and/or system doesn't give you a set of odds, you can't make an informed decision on whether to do the think. 

For example, the risks of Malaria are, while still potentially lethal, for a US citizen, treatment is readily available and fairly cheap... but for an African in one of the jungles, even the needed supportive care is expensive and hard to get, let alone the drugs to fight it. So, if the adventure is set in "The Great Malarial Swamp," the average american isn't going to understand the risks, unless the game is a moderns. before the 19th C, malaria was a killer. Even into the early 20th, it carried strong risks of death for those who got it... much more survivable now. Most first world people don't realize just how deadly it was. Or, in Africa, still is.


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## CapnZapp (Aug 15, 2020)

pnewman said:


> No, the risk should reflect the plausible risk. Robbing a (US) bank is harder than it was 80 years ago. Not getting caught after you leave is also harder. The reward from doing so is less than it was 80 years ago because cash is not as important as it used to be (and maybe because inflation has made "as much cash as you can even carry" have less value).
> 
> This does not mean that the GM of a bank robbing game set in 2020 is being unfair compared to the GM of a bank robbing game set in 1940. It means the world has changed.



This gives a narrative reply to a statistical concern. Until you start talking the same language, expect to remain baffled by each other's position.


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