Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[OgreBattle]

The image of a Ground Pokemon stomping a foot to create an earthen barrier to block a fireblast is cool so hard/soft cover rules would have a lot of use in your game

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That is cool, but I don't see why the pokemon couldn't make a barrier that's Blocking Terrain. Depending on how much damage the fire blast does, it could annihilate the barrier enough to devolve it into Rough Terrain, and both of those can be used for cover... one just protects you from AOE attacks more than the other does.

EDIT: Fuck it, I made up Heavily Covered. It's like Covered, except there's Blocking Terrain directly in between you and someone else's line of sight, and it's twice as good. It also applies to especially dense fog or smoke. Think that's better?

[JigokuBosatsu]

One question, why?

Honestly, I always appreciate the folly/ambition of an RPG trying to create some sort of generative oracle system, but holy shit are the graphics just ass.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

What the fuck am I looking at?

[JigokuBosatsu]

What the fuck am I looking at?

That was my immediate reaction as well, but I went down the rabbit hole that is the rest of the book and I am both confused and disturbed.

[phlapjackage]

And why are certain words in single quotes, like 'Small' and 'Light' ?

[Archmage]

I wonder if that's intended to represent game terminology that is context-specific--a weapon is "small" based on the size of the wielder, for example.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Minor nooks and crannies in the enormous gulf of "what the fuck even is this game"

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I've decided to make Rarity an aspect of all the Pokemon species. This ranges from Common to Legendary and determines how much PP (Power Points, I look forward to saying this at the table all the time) the Pokemon starts with, as well as if you can catch it during downtime, with higher rarities being locked behind higher Tiers. While I haven't written up adventure design yet, this is also going to determine how easily you come across things in the field since it's literally codified and can be referred to for random encounters or whatever.
The reason I bring this up is if I'm missing anything else I could tie this mechanic to. I don't really want different Rarities to have different XP progressions or anything, because that's dumb. It's supposed to be a rough estimate of a Pokemon species' power, but only rough. Fortunately, nature has my back on this one - apex predators are way less populous than herbivores and plants and shit.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Ignore my last post, obviously I should have known that Rarity would factor into actually capturing the fucking things. I've gotten around to actually writing up the rules for doing that, and this is something I'm anxious about. I want people to be able to catch wild Pokemon in battles because the thought of doing otherwise is ludicrous to me. However, anyone who's looked into the formula on how the games do this will tell you that a human brain cannot do that sort of math while drunk on beer and pretzel salt.

So here it is, a hopefully tabletop friendly version of that. I just adapted PTU's errata rules.

[*]The basic idea is that you make an attack roll with a Pokeball to hit a Pokemon, and roll 1d20 + Your Tier to meet or exceed the Pokemon's Capture Rate. You can get bonuses to this roll by getting a 20 on your attack roll to hit it, through certain Features, or by having better balls. Getting a 20 on your Capture Roll is an auto-capture against everything except Mythical and Legendary Pokemon, because I don't want things to be too easy.



Checklists make me nervous, but I'm hoping this one's short and simple enough to be commitable to memory. Any input? The math there at the bottom runs the full spectrum of difficulty I expect people to go through. Although I guess you could have a Shiny Lugia...? And maybe Tiers could add +2 instead of +1...

[Pedantic]

Does it need to be that complicated in the first place? I presume you generally are going to have a lower number of battles in your tabletop game than normally occur in a pokemon video game session. As a result, shouldn't you really be trying to work backwards from how common you want pokemon captures to be?

I could totally see just making capture binary, based around hitting some threshold you can reach with either status conditions, damage or some combination of the above.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Well, that's the interesting thing. Currently, you can just go out and capture Pokemon as a Downtime Action whenever you have the chance, and you can catch anything you want from a certain list, which is influenced by where you are and what Tier you are, since going and getting shit that's stronger than you are for almost free is silly.

I really only see these coming into play when you happen to be fighting something that you also want to catch, and for me, part of the "thrill" of catching Pokemon is that small gamble you make when the ball connects. Watching that ball shake around is tense, and a binary capture system wouldn't reflect that. That being said, I do think you should be able to push the RNG heavily in your favor based on how strong you are, how fucked up your target is, and how strong your Pokeball is.

But how often do I want Pokemon captures to happen? It's thematically important and playing around making a team is just fun, but having a box full of neglected Pokemon isn't. We also want to avoid players hogging the spotlight by capturing all of the really cool shit, but I find that a difficult problem to work around without imposing arbitrary limits on Pokeballs. In my experience though, players make gentlemen's agreements to let other people catch stuff from time to time, so... hrm
I think it should happen more often earlier in a campaign when you're still setting the groundwork for your character, but less later on as the Pokemon you raise get stronger and closer to you. Unless your GM is really stingy with Pokemon though, I'm pretty sure that's how most players play Pokemon anyway?

[JigokuBosatsu]

I saw a ridiculous game PDF with design issues and that same 3d model abomination. Against my better judgement I went back to that Glyphs RPG site to see if it was the same designer and hoooooo boy. You better cinch up your saddle for this one, rough riders, the Spirituality & Philosophy section is one spicy pot of beans.

[Prak]

the Spirituality & Philosophy section

....you can't make me read that.

[deaddmwalking]

My take of what he's saying:

I'm lonely because I'm smart and understand the real truth (that can only be validated by my lived experience) and everyone lies to me because I'm the only perfect person.

[pragma]

Nice to be awarded the title of High Priest of Atheism. That said, I don't really know how his philosophy handles Christian Physicists, who definitely exist. Checkmate atheists?

[OgreBattle]

How do I calculate the following..

I have a system where there's a d6 roll to hit and a d6 roll to wound vs a target number. 6 to hit explodes resulting in another chance to hit. Same with wound rolls of 6. Exploding dice do not explode themselves.

What's the formula to figure out how many hits and wounds I can roll on a 4+ for hit and wound? What are the chances of wounding 4 times (exploding hits result in exploding wounds that all confirm)

Ex: A gun that fires once. Roll to hit once, on a 4+ it hits on a 6 it can fire again. After that it rolls to wound on a 4+, a 6 to wound rolls to wound again. So how do I calculate the odds of 1, 2, 3, 4 wounds with this?

[Trill]

I'm afraid you're going to have to give an example

[deaddmwalking]

How do I calculate the following..

I have a system where there's a d6 roll to hit and a d6 roll to wound vs a target number. 6 to hit explodes resulting in another chance to hit. Same with wound rolls of 6. Exploding dice do not explode themselves.

What's the formula to figure out how many hits and wounds I can roll on a 4+ for hit and wound? What are the chances of wounding 4 times (exploding hits result in exploding wounds that all confirm)

Ex: A gun that fires once. Roll to hit once, on a 4+ it hits on a 6 it can fire again. After that it rolls to wound on a 4+, a 6 to wound rolls to wound again. So how do I calculate the odds of 1, 2, 3, 4 wounds with this?

For the original to-hit the odds are 50% (4, 5, or 6 on a d6). Since 6 is already a hit, it doesn't increase the chance of a hit; just the chance of a second hit.

The odds of rolling a 6 (1 in 6) followed by the chance of rolling a 4,5, or 6 (1/2) are multiplied together; you have a 1 in 12 chance of hitting twice.

Since each die is independent and the second die cannot explode, your odds of a hit are 50% per die, plus 8% of scoring a second hit with that die.

No matter how many dice, you roll, the probability of a single die isn't going to change. If you want to know how likely it is that 4 dice all come up hits you'd multiple the individual chances - 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 = rolling 4 hits initially happens 1/16 times (likewise, rolling no hits on 4 dice).

[OgreBattle]

The wound step comes after the hit step (like warhams), so...

I roll a 6 to hit, the exploding hit hits. I now have two wound rolls to make that also explode, I roll 6's on both and the exploding hits land on a 4+. So from one hit that exploded I roll 2 wounds that exploded for 4 wounds total.

Is that a 1/1728 chance of happening? I multiplied 6*2*6*2*6*2 'cause for that to happen I need to roll a 6, then 4+, then do that two times again in the wound rolls.

---

Ok found a post on exploding 6's (Ork shooting in 8e) that explains that equation as (roll needed to hit so 2/6 for most ork shooting)*7/6

(https://www.reddit.com/r/orks/comments/ ... the_maths/)

[Omegonthesane]

That maths checks out - the actual exploded dice are independent probability events, even if we happen to not care about them unless a 6 is rolled on the first die.

[pragma]

Ignore me! I made a boneheaded math error!

[meschlum]

Have H be the probability of hitting (1/6 to 6/6) and W be the probability of wounding (same).

Your base chance (without exploding dice) of causing a wound is H * W.

With wounds potentially exploding, on a hit, you have: 1-W of doing 0 wounds, W-1/6 of doing 1 wound, 1/6 of doing one wound and getting an exploding wound die (with 1-W of the exploding die doing nothing and W of it doing an extra wound).

So on a hit, you get:
0 wounds: 1-W
1 wound: W - 1/6 + 1/6 * (1 - W) = W - W / 6 = 5 W / 6
2 wounds: 1/6 * W = W / 6

The same calculations can be applied to get the number of hits:

0 hits: 1 - H
1 hit: 5 H / 6
2 hits: H / 6

Combining the results gives the following:

4 wounds: requires 2 hits, and 2 wounds on each hit
H * W * W / 216
3 wounds: requires 2 hits, one with 1 wound and one with two
H * W * (10 W / 216)
2 wounds: two hits with 1 wound each, two hits one of which does 2 wounds and the other pings, or one hit with two wounds
H * W * (42 + 13 W) / 216
1 wound: two hits with 1 wound and 1 ping, or one hit with 1 wound
H * W * (210 - 60 W) / 216
0 wounds: two hits with 2 pings, one hit with a ping, or no hits
1 - H * W *(252 - 36 W) / 216

Assuming it's all on 4+, you have H = W = 0.5, so you get:

4 wounds: 1 / 1728
3 wounds: 10 / 1728
2 wounds: 97 / 1728
1 wound: 360 / 1728
0 wounds: 1260 / 1728

Expected number of wounds is 588/1728, a bit more than 1/3.

You miss half the time (1/2)
You hit without exploding 1/3 of the time and then ping 1/2 the time (another 1/6 of doing nothing, for a total of 2/3 (32/48))
You explode 1/6 of the time, scoring a single hit 1/12 of the time (ping 1/2) and two hits 1/12 of the time (ping twice 1/4) - total 1/16 of a ping (3/48)

Total is 35/48 of doing no damage, matching the formula.

[Dean]

Does anyone know a fantasy book series about a world where mages have visible aura's and there are mage hunter characters who work for the kingdom who learn to see those aura's to hunt mages?
It's kinda like Running Man but with mages.

[OgreBattle]

Thanks for the formulas, it's been very helpful.

Found the formula for what "reroll 1's" adds, it's a x16.66% improvement to the base roll.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tau40K/comment ... is_always/
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In Dragon Ball, Hunter x Hunter characters can learn to sense auras. Frieza uses psychic power instead of aura so he can't be sensed that way.

Oh yeah RIFTS has Psi-Hounds to hunt psychics and various ways to track magic, especially associated with the Coalition States