m.mavnn Posted December 16, 2021 Author Report Share Posted December 16, 2021 5 minutes ago, Ninja-Bear said: Btw, let us know how it goes. The good and the bad. Ha! You might be waiting a few months/a year plus for actual play results - the players are tired of the Pathfinder rules, but want to finish off the current story without changing rule set (which is fairly involved, we're playing through the Kingmaker campaign if you've seen it/the computer game based on it). The fact that they decided to make actual characters rather than just buckets of numbers means there's also a lot of individual clean up to do for a satisfying finale beyond "beating the big bad". I'm just impatient because DMing high level Pathfinder is a slog. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duke Bushido Posted December 16, 2021 Report Share Posted December 16, 2021 14 hours ago, m.mavnn said: I'm all ears! ... Well, apart from the bits that aren't. But I'm definitely interested in the realizations. killer Shrike covered most of it, but it cones down to the bell curve. When rolling for a Skill check, there is a typical range generated by the results of 3d6. Your players can expect to roll in this range, and still be concerned about that possible flub and still hold hope of that gkorious perfect success. If you are inclined to use fumble and critical successes, they still happen on 3d6, but instead of fumbling 5 perxent of the rime (d20), they will only fumble about one-half a percent of the time. This alows the characters (and by extension, the players) to really be the competent group of highly-skilled adventurers they want to be. A critical success becones equally as rare, making it something even more special, and therefore more exciting. Skill progression becones more interesting as well, and again, this is because of the bell curve. Once characters fight there way to 11- or so, each step after that- even a single level, demonstrates a radical leap in ability (owing to the percentage breakdowns of any given result within the curve. Once the come out of that midrange, they are -demonstrably world-class masters of their skill: a 16 or less means less than a ten percent chance of failure (assuming no penalties are assessed). In regards to damage, the curve works the same way. It is extremely important when considering this to remember that armor and other defenses are radically different between HERO and the polyhedral game. In the polyhedral game, better defenses mean the attack misses. In HERO, there no such correlation. The armor has no bearing on the success of the attack, but does affect how damage is determined. If a character has an atttack that does 2d6 damage, he can expect to roll somewhere around 7 the bulk of the time. This is not the case with a d12. Not only can he expect to roll less than 7 about half the he rolls, he can expect to roll a 1 every 12 rolls, which is something he absolutely cannot do on 2d anything. This is important when the GM is trying to balance his games, and it is important when the player is spending his resources. Both know that defenses at about 10 will mean that a lot of strikes will result in no damage to the character, but it still preserves the fear of mortality by resulting in some,damge from a lot of possible strikes. With a d12, defenses of 10 would make the character nearly invulnerable, meaning he would only take damage one time in six. If that damage was 1d20, he would take damage haof the time, and a fourth of it would be heavy damage indeed. The d6 bell curve works quite well with the system HERO uses for damage and for skill resolution. That makes sense, given that the system was designed specifically to take advantage of that curve. The end result is enough consistency to allow players and gms to determine lumits and levels that make play as light or as deadly as they want it to be and still have a realsitic threat of spectacular success and failure. If you really do want to tinker with the dice, though, I woukd toss out the suggest to try swappibg d6 for d4. The curve is spectacularly loaded for consistent center-of-the-road results, with the extreme ends being almost eliminated. It is very remiscent of games that say things like "does 25 damage." Scott Ruggels, Vanguard and m.mavnn 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninja-Bear Posted December 17, 2021 Report Share Posted December 17, 2021 Just thinking, if you want to roll multiple polys kinda go Savage worlds route. Give Strength a poly die and each weapon a die too! That way you’re rolling more than one die. Duke Bushido 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duke Bushido Posted December 17, 2021 Report Share Posted December 17, 2021 That might be interesting: 3d6 STR damage; 3d8 for fist loads; 3d10 for a cudgel-- that sort of thing? Interesting.... Though how to count Body... Hmm.... time to cogitate a bit! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninja-Bear Posted December 17, 2021 Report Share Posted December 17, 2021 7 hours ago, Duke Bushido said: That might be interesting: 3d6 STR damage; 3d8 for fist loads; 3d10 for a cudgel-- that sort of thing? Interesting.... Though how to count Body... Hmm.... time to cogitate a bit! Well SW has STR (and the rest of the attributes) d4-d12 and weapons rated anywhere from d4-d12. So you could have say d8 STR + d10 weapon. Amp that is the base I was thinking of. Duke Bushido 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m.mavnn Posted December 17, 2021 Author Report Share Posted December 17, 2021 I started getting curious on this one, so I put some code to work crunching some numbers. I decided to start with three different levels of damage dealing, and then compared each one against an opponent with 0, 4 and 8 points of resistant defences (I'm assuming killing attacks here). The scenarios are (hopefully this is kind of readable even if you don't know the programming language). Feel free to suggest variants you'd be interested/other ways of comparing the effects, they're pretty quick to code up. scenarios :: [(Text, Prob Integer)] scenarios = [ ("4 DCs d8", d8), ("4 DCs d6 + 1", roll 1 d6 1), ("5 DCs d10", d10), ( "5 DCs d6 + d3", do half <- diceRoll 3 full <- d6 pure $ full + half ), ("10 DCs 2d10", roll 2 d10 0), ("10 DCs 3d6+1", roll 3 d6 1) ] The results are a little verbose at the moment, as I knocked this out over my lunch break: 4 DCs d8 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 4.5 Standard deviation: 2.29128784747792 4 DCs d8 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 1.25 Standard deviation: 1.479019945774904 4 DCs d8 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 0.0 Standard deviation: 0.0 4 DCs d6 + 1 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 4.5 Standard deviation: 1.707825127659933 4 DCs d6 + 1 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 1.0 Standard deviation: 1.1547005383792515 4 DCs d6 + 1 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 0.0 Standard deviation: 0.0 5 DCs d10 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 5.5 Standard deviation: 2.8722813232690143 5 DCs d10 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 2.1 Standard deviation: 2.1656407827707715 5 DCs d10 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 0.3 Standard deviation: 0.6403124237432849 5 DCs d6 + d3 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 5.5 Standard deviation: 1.8929694486000912 5 DCs d6 + d3 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 1.7222222222222223 Standard deviation: 1.5918387535438225 5 DCs d6 + d3 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 5.555555555555555e-2 Standard deviation: 0.22906142364542556 10 DCs 2d10 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 11.0 Standard deviation: 4.06201920231798 10 DCs 2d10 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 7.04 Standard deviation: 3.9847710097319267 10 DCs 2d10 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 3.56 Standard deviation: 3.2964223030431037 10 DCs 3d6+1 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 11.5 Standard deviation: 2.958039891549808 10 DCs 3d6+1 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 7.5 Standard deviation: 2.958039891549808 10 DCs 3d6+1 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 3.662037037037037 Standard deviation: 2.689424335780339 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m.mavnn Posted December 17, 2021 Author Report Share Posted December 17, 2021 Going with @Ninja-Bear 's idea of giving both the characters strength and their weapon a dice size (would mean ignoring STR min, and reducing weapon damage I guess?) you'd end up with something like... STR 10 (1/2D6) + Dagger (1/2d6) against defense 0 Expected outcome: 4.0 Standard deviation: 1.1547005383792515 STR 10 (1/2D6) + Dagger (1/2d6) against defense 4 Expected outcome: 0.4444444444444444 Standard deviation: 0.6849348892187751 STR 10 (1/2D6) + Dagger (1/2d6) against defense 8 Expected outcome: 0.0 Standard deviation: 0.0 STR 10 + Dagger normal 1d6+1 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 4.5 Standard deviation: 1.707825127659933 STR 10 + Dagger normal 1d6+1 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 1.0 Standard deviation: 1.1547005383792515 STR 10 + Dagger normal 1d6+1 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 0.0 Standard deviation: 0.0 STR 20 (1d8) + Greatsword (1d8) against defense 0 Expected outcome: 9.0 Standard deviation: 3.24037034920393 STR 20 (1d8) + Greatsword (1d8) against defense 4 Expected outcome: 5.0625 Standard deviation: 3.1268744378372473 STR 20 (1d8) + Greatsword (1d8) against defense 8 Expected outcome: 1.875 Standard deviation: 2.218529918662356 STR 20 + Greatsword normal 2 1/2d6 against defense 0 Expected outcome: 9.0 Standard deviation: 2.5495097567963922 STR 20 + Greatsword normal 2 1/2d6 against defense 4 Expected outcome: 5.0092592592592595 Standard deviation: 2.5294391501410183 STR 20 + Greatsword normal 2 1/2d6 against defense 8 Expected outcome: 1.6018518518518519 Standard deviation: 1.8203571831781864 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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