Banish the ignorance, please

[clehrich]

To follow up M.J.'s point, let me note that we all, in ordinary life, strategize.  That is, we have some sort of goal, and we try to achieve that goal.  Since there are a zillion possible factors involved, we can't know the odds terribly clearly.  But we can, and do, with amazing success, correctly guess the general likelihoods of our desired results coming from a particular course of action.  Debating how we do this is one of those huge, painful areas of epistemology and the philosophy of action, but it seems pretty clear that we do this pretty well.

But we, the players, can't always do this as well as our characters.  So it's helpful to have at least a solid sense of the basic probabilities.

[Paganini]

M.J., that wasn't quite what I was getting at. More like... why do the probabilities have to be easy to calculate exactly? Why not assume that experience with the game will give all the information you need to know? I mean, like, if I play TROS, some of the dice pool probabilities get pretty complicated with all the sliding scales. There might be some holes and breakpoints and things that I'm not aware of. But in general, I know that more dice is good, lower target numbers are good (or whatever the specific case is for TROS, I forgeT), and so on.

So, that is, I have an intuitive grasp of the probabilities, in the sense that I know the scale and the effects. But I don't know the specifics, and I can't figure them in my head (which is what I think most people mean by "intuitive grasp of probabilities). Like... it's trivial to figure the probabilities of d20 system rolls. Why is that necessarily a good thing? For something that's supposed to facilitate tactical choices and player competition and skill, I'd think that something a little less obvious would be more appropriate.

[inky]

Most heavily tactical systems have layers of complexity that scale up arbitrarily high. The difference is basically whether the introductory level is easy to grasp or not, and I think there's a big playability advantage in systems that make it easy to work out how successful a basic action is.

This doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing is a solved problem, either. Like you say, it's trivial to work out in D&D that if you have attack bonus X and the monster has armor class Y, your chance to hit is Z -- but if you're using power attack, how many points of attack bonus should you sacrifice for damage bonus if you want to optimize your average per-round damage? Or maybe you'd be better off wielding a second weapon instead, or using aid another to help your buddy hit.

By comparison, 7th Sea's system doesn't get nearly as complex at the high end since there's not that much tactical stacking, but the basic die roll is hard to analyze, and this makes it difficult to design characters or figure out how likely you are to succeed at things in play. Sure, you can tell that having a high trait is good, and it seems to be better than a high skill, but it's not obvious to a new player that raising your skill past 2 is virtually useless, or when it's better to add a drama die before you roll and when after.