[Mountain Witch] Probability and Damage

[timfire]

I worked out some math for various dice probabilities for The Mountain Witch. You can check them out [here].

Basic resolution is pretty predictable. What surprised me was damage. Currently, the rule is that damage can never reduce a roll below 1. I thought that damage would have a lopsided spread, meaning an increasingly high chance for worse and worse failure. (Basically the reverse of the Betraying probabilities.)

But it doesn't. Because the roll is capped at 1, what it does is flatten the distribution. With high damage, because the player is basically reduced to just rolling 1, his roll is basically voided. That means the opponent ends up having an equal (1/6) chance of rolling anything from a tie to a double success (kill).

The reason I made the capping rule was for aiding. I thought that it didn't make sense for an aiding roll to go negative and hurt the other player's roll. I also liked the effect it created in aiding: If the minimum of two rolls was 2, that meant that opponents could never gain a double success. That means, two characters trusting and aiding one another could never die (for as long as they still have trust)! They may get the crap beaten out of them, but they'll keep going. I like that.

But I'm not sure I like the probabilities of one wounded character fighting by themselves. What do y'all think? Should I remove the cap? If I did that, I could just say that when aiding, a negative roll just counts as zero.

I guess I could try to have it both ways. I could say that a lone character has no roll cap, but an aiding character alwasy gets at least 1. Does that sound contrived?

Or, do y'all think that the cap as it stands now is fine? The rules as they stand now actually make it pretty hard to kill a PC, which some might consider a good thing.

Thanks everyone!

[daMoose_Neo]

Actually, that might work well.
Thematically, as long as you have someone watching your back, you're safer than not. So, that translates well mechanically. If you have a hand, your buddy helps you and you help him and both walk away with bumps and bruises but you DO walk away. Whereas when you're on your own, you could easily be in a lot more trouble, in over your head.