Re: [GZG] Opposed roll randomness (Was: [SG3]: What if?)

[Samuel Penn <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 01 February 2008 16:44:32 Allan Goodall wrote:
> Therein lies the issue that Oerjan et al have been saying. That's
> entirely the _wrong_ way to look at it.

No it's not. I'm interested in how things work and why they give
the results they do, so it's the right way for me.

> People are assigning a worth to each roll of the dice on both sides.
> One side rolls good while the other side rolls bad, or one side rolls
> bad and the other side rolls terrible. It's natural, of course, but
> that's not how you should look at it.

I can look at it any way that interests me.

> You should look at the overall odds of success, period. It's the end
> result that you need to worry about it, not the individual dice rolls
> that you took to get there.

That depends on your point of view. I like looking at how a mechanic
gets to the result. I find it interesting. There's lots of games where
the results are okay, but I don't find the mechanics used to generate
the results elegant. You and Oerjan may not care about such things,
but I do.

With the possible exception of vehicle armour (I'd prefer Nd12 rather
than d12 x N), the results seem to work okay (I haven't played that
much Stargrunt). In some respects it's elegant, and works well, but
when I step back and think about it, I'd prefer the results were
achieved a different way. Except, it seems to be at a local maxima, and
any small modification (such as +/- to the die roll) seem to be worse.

> As Stephen pointed out, there's a 1.3% chance for a Green to beat an
> elite. If you had a big chart that said "Green defeating Elite: 1 on a
> D100" and a Green unit rolled a 01, we wouldn't be having this
> conversation.

Except you've totally misinterpreted Stephen's numbers (which stated
the chance of a particular roll, not the chance of Green winning,
which is much higher).

Even ignoring that, we'd be having a conversation about how I
think high = good, so a system where rolling low was good
(Green are rolling in your example) didn't feel right to me.

-- 
Be seeing you,                         http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.                        Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

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