Dice odds

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
1

So since I can't do hard statstics but can write code... I wrote a little app to roll dice and show me the results.  One interesting thing is just how often a fairly decent dice set d8,d8,d8 succeeds cleanly only 4 percent of the time.  It makes it clear that boosts are your friend.

 

Here are the results of a 8d,8d,8d. The values for overcome and boosts are the percentage chance of getting that value, the Attack/Defend results is the average value you would roll. (With either Min,Mid, or Max)

 

Oh and devs.. if these look wrong, let me know. I might have made a typo somewhere. ;)

 

2

I've been working on an Excel spreadsheet with graphs of the Min, Mid, Max, and Min+Max probabilities for all 35 possible combinations of three dice ranging from d4 to d12.  And I can't write code, so it was mostly brute force.  I'm still putting the finishing touches on it, but what would be the best way to share that with everyone here?

3

I would assume you could use Google drive or drop box.

Either way we should compare values to sanity check our work.

4

I mostly consulted math professors and game designers instead of running the numbers myself - however, keep in mind that a core assumption is that you will be making many Overcomes in your "wheelhouse" that fits with one or more of your d10s and a principle to use your Max die, and that's how you get clean successes more often. Otherwise, you'll be suceeding with twists that drive the story along or you'll use teamwork to get some bonuses first.

5

When I get home going to open my Stats book and look at the odds. Kind of glad I didn't sell that book back.

But I agree with Dave and what he said. 

6

Don't get me wrong, I like that idea. Action scenes are high stress. If you are fairly solid at doing something, being forced to do it in hurry, under stress, can force errors. So either take the twists (which can be fun), or give yourselve a boost (and risk running out of time). Good stuff.

 

7

Merry Christmas everyone!  As a present to you all, here's my spreadsheet of RPG probabilities I've been working on:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dcn63gesrjw63q5/RPG%20Probabilities.xlsx?dl=0

There's a page for each of the 35 possible combinations of 3 dice ranging from d4 to d12 (I don't think you'd ever be rolling 3d4 or 3d12, but I included them for completeness).  They're organized by categories and then from lowest to highest, so first is the category where all three dice are the same, going from 3d4 to 3d12, then where two of the dice are the same, going from 2d4 1d6 to 2d12 1d10, and finally where all three dice are different, going from d4 d6 d8 to d8 d10 d12.  If you think there's a better way to organize it, or if there's other information you'd like to see, let me know.

Each page has 3 graphs.  The first is the probability of getting each number from 1 to 12+ for the Min, Mid, Max, and Min+Max dice.  So if the Mid bar goes up to 0.4 for 8, that means you have a 40% chance of the Mid die being exactly an 8, but if it went up to 0.4 for 12+, that means you have a 40% chance of that die being 12 or higher (which only really applies to Min+Max, but I wanted to make that clear, since it does skew that part of the graph).

I then realized that when you're playing the game, you don't really care what your odds are of getting exactly an 8.  You want to know what your odds are of getting at least an 8.  So for the second graph, I reformulated the probabilites to show this, which is why these ones are labeled 1+, 2+...

For the third graph, I clumped the individual number probabilities into the ranges that give different Overcome results.  This can also be used to see what the size of your Boost/Hinder mod is likely to be, since they use the same ranges.

I hope everyone enjoys this!  Please let me know if there's anything I can do to make it more helpful!

 

Edit:  I used another spreadsheet to actually come up with the probabilities and just copied the results onto here to keep this more clean.  If someone wants to see where the results came from, I can add that too.

8

Never tell me the odds!     :wink: