thread: 2013-10-21 : The Magic Trick: Otherkind Dice
On 2013-10-21, Josh W wrote:
Interesting rule! Looking at the probabilities, this is actually a quite friendly one, despite the way it shows you all these negative possibilities:
Assuming you want to gain ground and hurt your enemy, and you're willing to be hurt yourself if you can avoid your friends being in danger.
The last criteria can actually be handled outside of this dice mechanic; attack the problem in such a way that they are not put in danger but you are.
Doing this effectively means you effectively drop the bottom two numbers, which means you're looking at the 3rd highest number among those dice.
The probability of that being higher than 1 is 96%, and the probability of it being higher than 3 is 50%.
So if you go ahead of your allies to protect them from danger, you have a 50/50 chance of being able to avoid being harmed, and a 60% chance of achieving your objective while doing it.
Having allies in the mix changes things dramatically, the probability of you all getting out unscathed is only 19%, although conversely, if you don't care much about their welfare, the probabilities are the same. This suggests to me a situation in which heroic figures brave danger alone, whereas less heroic characters try to get their community to shelter them.
Also, because of how in dangerous situations you can dump bad dice into your goal's outcome, it suggests that when in danger it's useful to be ambitious in unexpected directions, seeking to make something of the situation, as then that roll will be less likely to negatively effect the other outcomes if you dump it!
On the other hand, the objective outcome interacts a little weirdly with the off balance/defensive harm result. I'm guessing that acts like some kind of penalty dice for future conflicts? It's odd that you could gain your objective, say capturing and disarming your foe, and yet also be on the defensive.
I like the idea of changing the 4-5 harm result on damage to encourage seeking help in some way, so that there's a bit of tension between going off alone and getting backup when you need it.
