Is it me, or is WoD's Mechanic stupid?

[Judging__Eagle]

In the World of Darkness rules, everything revolves around the holy d10.

A bit of an uncommon dice to use among people who play d20 games, but w/e.

In any case, the way of the mechanic, as I understnad and have used it one session so far is this:

Everything you do has a combination of your natural ability (mential, social, physical; or one of 2 racial abilities and will power) and you training; involved.

So, a Puzzle Game is your Wits or Intelligence, plus your training in Enigmas.

Now, you take those two numbers and you roll that many d10's.


Each task has a Difficulty raging from 2-9; and if you roll the Difficulty required number on a dice, you get 1 "success".


But, here's where it get wierd.

If you roll a 10, it's an Auto-Success and a 1 is an Auto-Fail.

Now, Auto-Success is easy enough to understand; you rolled high enough.

Also, 10 is more than enough to meet most Difficulties that I've seen.

If the game wants something to be 'more' difficult, they simply require more successes to achieve the desired goal.


the problem is Auto-Fails, since, you have to remove one success per auto-fail that you get.

Meaning, that someone who is maxed in both Brawl and has Maxd Str, will fvck up more often than someone who has more middling stats.

Which is wierd, since I always figured that more training means you screw up less.

At least, that's how I seem to interpret it the rules.

Am I far off?

Would the game suffer if you drop Auto-Fails and Auto-Successes?

There's also something called specialties that you gain if you have 4 or 5 points in an attribute or ability; where you get a bonus dice if you ever roll a 10 on an attempt that's linked with your specialty.

So, specialized characters can fail more often, when doing something that they're specialized with.

Our GM said that that seemed ridiculous when I mentioned it and a 1 on a bonus dice rolled due to having a specialty is ignored.

I came up with this idea for adjucating rolls in a WoD game:

1. Auto Successes don't exist, neither to Auto-Fails. Also, if you want something to be 'harder'; ask for more successes.

Auto-fails just punish people who are better in their field, since 10% of all rolls make an other 10% of all total rolls null and void.


2. For every 5 dice you have while rolling in something you have a specialty in, you get one bonus dice. Thus someone with 10 dice (the normal max), could get 12 dice instead.


That seems simple enough.

Is it theright way to go about changing things though?

[RandomCasualty]

1175032898[/unixtime]]
But, here's where it get wierd.

If you roll a 10, it's an Auto-Success and a 1 is an Auto-Fail.

Now, Auto-Success is easy enough to understand; you rolled high enough.

Also, 10 is more than enough to meet most Difficulties that I've seen.

If the game wants something to be 'more' difficult, they simply require more successes to achieve the desired goal.


the problem is Auto-Fails, since, you have to remove one success per auto-fail that you get.

Meaning, that someone who is maxed in both Brawl and has Maxd Str, will fvck up more often than someone who has more middling stats.

OK here's your problem.

A 1 auto-fail isn't really an auto-fail, because you're rolling more than one dice. If you were rolling a single dice, it would be an auto-fail, but this gets into the deal that more skilled people screw up less.

Difficulties range generally around the 4-7 range, meaning that you're far better rolling more dice than less.

Lets use a basic difficulty 6 roll as an example. That's a 50% chance of success, a 40% chance of failure, and a 10% chance of rolling a botch (natural 1).

Since success occurs at a much greater rate than a botch does, you're much better rolling more dice than less. And you only screw up if your botches exceed your successes, which won't happen, since on a diff 6 roll, on average, half your dice are successes and only one out of every 10 is a botch.

Weird things do happen when you get to difficulty 10 checks however, where you really are better off just rolling one dice, but difficulty 10 rarely actually happens in WoD, and is made to reflect something that is so hard to do that you probably shouldn't even try.

[Judging__Eagle]

Yes, but my rolling of 1's in every case that I roll is always higher than anything else.

Some people just can't roll high. Also, half to one quarter of my rolls are botches, I've seriously had instances where I should be the only one succeeding at a check not happen since my botches mach or outnumber my successes.

The 10% bullshit only applies to actual random number generators, not tumbled and knocked plastic dice.

Also, the more dice I (or anyone that I've noticed) rolls, the less likely they are to succeed, since they'll roll more 1's.

Really, I thnk it's that you notice number bias a lot stronger in smaller fields of random number generators.

[Cielingcat]

Maybe you just need new dice.

[bitnine]

This is why difficulty 10 is and always has been bullshit. And why they introduced the ideas of botch-only-on-no-successes and nuts-to-difficulty-10-use-difficulty-9-and-a-threshold. Also, magic dice that deviate from statistical trends are always a bitch.

[erik]

I find a strong temptation to roll the 10-sider so that the even side always comes up, since they're all on the same side.

[Brobdingnagian]

Coming from the guy who once rolled D&D stats using 5d6, rerolling 1's and 2's, and ended up with two 9's...

I think WoD could benefit from mine, JE's, and most of Gaming Den's opinion. But then, the same could be said for most P&P games.

[Username17]

Later editions of WoD were made with static difficulties and varied thresholds to determine success or failure. Of course, they were still written by smacktards who wouldn't know statistics if they were being given a money shot by them - so even that doesn't really help.

The number of "abilities" that don't actually help you is astounding.

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

I get the same feeling when I read through L5R.

*shudder*

[josephbt]

Has anyone seen the Savage Worlds mechanics?

It is actually better to have a d4 skill than a d6 skill because the dice explode. So, your chances of getting a decent result are bigger if you roll a d4+d6 than 2d6.

[Cielingcat]

What do you mean by "the dice explode"? Do you mean that big die fuck you over, in which case it sounds like counter-intuitive crap, or do you mean that you play with actual exploding dice, in which case it's the best system ever?

[Judging__Eagle]

1175054974[/unixtime]]Coming from the guy who once rolled D&D stats using 5d6, rerolling 1's and 2's, and ended up with two 9's...

I think WoD could benefit from mine, JE's, and most of Gaming Den's opinion. But then, the same could be said for most P&P games.

Hey, remember how I got no stats over a 13 using that rolling method?

That was fun.

Although, your 2 9's among 6 sets was hilarious.




Frank, are you reffering to 'specialties' that you 'unlock' when you have 4 or 5 dots in an attribute or ability?

If you mean those, then yeah, you have to be a bloody dictionary to pick things that are useful.

Seriously, if you pick up something like: "Lateral Thinking" for your 4th Dot in intelligence, it's brutally useful.

If you pick something like, "husky" for your 4th stamina, you'll almost never see it used.

Although, you could be talking about something else that's equally, if not more stupid than the specialization's system.

[virgil]

The Savage Worlds has an open-ended system with its dice, meaning any time you roll the maximum value for a particular die, you roll again and add to the prior roll (doing so again if the die rolls maximum). The system only counts the 'single' highest die roll in regards to how successful you are.

This means getting a 6+ on a d4 is about a 12.5% chance (rolling a 4 and then a 2 or higher), while a d6 has a 16.7% chance of getting that. Getting a 9+ on a single d4 has a 6.25% chance, while that d6 has an 8.3%, and a d8 has a 12.5% chance.

From what I recall of the system, there's only a couple specific numbers where a smaller die is truly better, at least from a statistical view point. It's cheaper (point-wise) to buy more dice than it is to upgrade dice, and more dice is better than bigger dice. This creates a notable effect of people wanting a pile of medium-size dice and avoiding d12s due to the prohibitive cost.

@Judging_Eagle - They've recently changed the dice mechanic slightly in the WoD when they upgraded their system. Now everything has a fixed difficulty, 8, and all natural 10s are a success with a reroll AND natural 1s don't count against you. In fact, the only time you get a critical failure is if you have enough penalties to technically have no dice, where you're then allowed a single die, and THEN get a natural 1.

[tzor]

It's not that the WoD mechanic was "stupid" it is that the WoD mechanic was designed by a Malkavian. It was actually based on a common system which used d6's at the time. The system tends to work more or less unless you start exploing the "edge" of the mechanic space, that is to say you start adding a whole lot of dice or you make the success number really high.

(I think I have a link to an old web page at home that gave all the bizzare success percent chances for a given level and pool of dice. Fascinating reading if you are a malkavian. Otherwise it's just plain old insane!)

As to the fun of open ended dice, I think I just found open ended true love after playing a game of Hack Master at a convention. Open ened d4's? Magic missles of vile doom I tell you!

[Josh_Kablack]

My observations on WoD mechanics from way back in my Exalted playtest days:

1. It's almost trivially easy to write a computer program which exhaustively lists all combinations dice results and then searches for the chances of success/fail/botch/critical success at any target number or number of successes. For dice pools above 8-10 dice the program execution time starts to get annoying though. I really need to reinstall java, refresh my memory on that stuff and take a day or two to write a WoD probability applet.

2. The numbers don't quite work the way you think.

3. The numbers sure as hell don't work the way most of the authors think.

4. A lot of the particulars, such as how any particular WoD handles specializations, botches and critical success can change things a lot.

5. In general, at least for 1st ed Exalted, the more dice you have the more likely you are to succeed and the more dice you have the more likely you are to botch. As the dice pool increases, the chance of regular failure decreases.

[Judging__Eagle]

There's no way that I can find this revision of the mechanic online, is there?

Or is there a book that I could look up or something?

b/c this makes a lot more sense:

They've recently changed the dice mechanic slightly in the WoD when they upgraded their system. Now everything has a fixed difficulty, 8, and all natural 10s are a success with a reroll AND natural 1s don't count against you. In fact, the only time you get a critical failure is if you have enough penalties to technically have no dice, where you're then allowed a single die, and THEN get a natural 1.

[Username17]

2. The numbers don't quite work the way you think.

3. The numbers sure as hell don't work the way most of the authors think.

Whether you are playing Exalted, WoD, nWoD, or one of the numerous spin-off titles such as Aberrant, this is totally the true.

Heck, in nWoD they have a mechanic that adds numbers that get you extra dice (9 again, it's called). This is bad, because you are literally presented with the choice between rolling more dice where all dice have a lower chance of gaining bonus dice and rolling less dice where all dice have a higher chance - thus making the cutoff point for when you want one or the other determinable with elementary calculus.

---

But it's not just that the authors throw down bad math to back up their story options. Honestly, a lot of the story options are dumb too. Auspex 1 gives you free Baatezu style "See in Darkness", and the people who get Auspex can purchase themselves a bonus where they get access to a special extra discipline where the first level gives you the ability to pay 1 Blood to get temporary Darkvision.

I don't know why I would pay a big pile of XP and blood to get the ability to see poorly in shadows when I already have the ability to see in total darkness. There aren't any die rolls, the ability is just objectively inane.

-Username17

[Brobdingnagian]

WoD - World of Darkness and Folly

[erik]

1175100196[/unixtime]]
As to the fun of open ended dice, I think I just found open ended true love after playing a game of Hack Master at a convention. Open ened d4's? Magic missles of vile doom I tell you!

In deadlands my harrowed managed to slap the hell out of a Hanging Judge with a whip. My piddly 1d4 damage wound up dealing 31! That die had usually rolled crappy prior, and pretty much since as well.

[edit: and for the record, this wasn't intentional cheating, I tried throwing the die in a variety of increasingly random ways (lobbing it high into the air, bouncing it off of stuff) as the damage progressed into the wacky realm]

[Username17]

I don't like d4s because they have an acute angle separating the sides. When I was in practice, I could roll a d4 across a table and have it come up the number I wanted three out of four tosses. The process of turning from one face to another uses up so much energy that if you toss it right it is very likely to turn over only once. Thus you can send a die spinning and bouncing across a meter of table and have it come up four almost every time.

-Username17

[josephbt]

@Frank

One of my DMs actually accused a player of cheating on d4 rolls. We all stood up for the guy, so the "charges" were dropped, but later I found out that the guy really could roll a 4 three times out of four.
My reason for hating d4s is because they hurt like hell when you step on them. We call them caltrops.

[Brobdingnagian]

You should see when they get thrown in someone's eye.

"Here's dice in your eye!"

"Was that supposed to hurt?"

"Fool, those were my to-hit dice. These are my damage dice!"

"OW!"

[Judging__Eagle]

Everyone does Joseph, everyone does.

[MrWaeseL]

You should see when they get thrown in someone's eye.

"Here's dice in your eye!"

"Was that supposed to hurt?"

"Fool, those were my to-hit dice. These are my damage dice!"

"OW!"

Ahaha that's horrible.

[Brobdingnagian]

8-Bit Theatre. The one where they're fighting Drizz'l.