So the other day, somebody posted a great blog about statistical odds (something to do with merging Dungeon Crawl Classics with Dungeon World), and it got me thinking…what if I made a “7” a failure, and “11+” a total success? That would mean 1-7 fails, 8-10 is partial success, and 11+ is total success. If I wanted to make a hack that included a wider number range (for, say, a superhero hack), or just a hack with a traditional skill system (like, say, a straight hack of Call of Cthulhu), then tweaking those success numbers just a bit allows a larger range of stats without completely breaking the game. What’re everyone’s thoughts on that?
So the other day, somebody posted a great blog about statistical odds (something to do with merging Dungeon Crawl…
So the other day, somebody posted a great blog about statistical odds (something to do with merging Dungeon Crawl…
Without putting it in practice, I find it hard to say for sure. My guess is that it wouldn’t BREAK the game, But I also don’t think you need that for a more easy/hard game.
I’d suggest instead to give more/few hard movies. If you wanna make it tough, give hard moves on 7-9 rolls all the time. Don’t snowball, just play hardcore. You do this, BAM, that happens, what do you do? BAM again.
I think it would be an issue in play experience. AW is great cause failure is interesting but too much failure is frustrating. AW is set up so that if you are average (flat zero) at something you have a 50% shot of succeeding. While the real world doesn’t work like that, it does feel right to a player. ‘I’m not good at this, but I’m not bad. The outcomes are that I succeed or a I fail so I guess I have a fifty fifty shot at it. Let’s go for it.” This is basically aligning the rules with the Representativeness Heuristic humans have. The problem is when people realize that’s not true they get frustrated. Kinda like the classic DnD lvl 1 scenario where you keep missing the goblin and it keeps missing you (DnD at level 1 sucks). I think if you want less success in the game the smarter route is to lower the stat blocks. That way players can see that they aren’t as great and can adjust their expectations. After all, a +1 shouldn’t be a 50-50 die roll.
Igor Toscano probably has the point on this. Harder moves, not harder to hit.
Since seven has the greatest frequency, it would mean that the vast majority of attempts would fail. The precedent for this is Classic Traveller which used an 8+ for successes, but with Die Modifiers to fiddle with.
I toyed with increasing the range of modifiers by upping the die types to 2d10, and using 11+ as partial success and 16+ as better, with 10 or under being a miss (similar to 7/10 odds,) for a game with dragon PCs because I wanted a larger range of modifiers — similar to wanting the extra range for supers, no?
After playtesting it once, I gave up on it — the increase in the range of modifiers didn’t really add anything for me personally. You might run into the same thing here, you might not — but it didn’t work for me. As for manipulating the odds, I dunno!