Maths behind Sorcerer

[Ian O'Rourke]

Anyone know the details of the statistics behind Sorcerer? Percentage changes of success given various dice pools (using D10 or D20)? Or the way it is worked out.

It is beyond my capcity to work out.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Know what? Don't work it out.

Look at it this way. If both parties roll the same number of dice, then each has a 50-50 chance of success (think of coins as two-sided dice, then think of flipping coins).

Now, make the number of dice unequal. The side with more dice gets a higher chance. Just go into it with that, and that's all you need. I strongly suspect you are having GM-worries about "knowing" when your NPCs will fail or succeed, for purposes of subtle railroading.

Two more points.

1) The Sorcerer system is capable of surprising reversals, not predictably, but enough to destroy pre-planned outcomes of a given rolled conflict. I suspect this is why a lot of people who try to play the game light-Sim run into problems.

2) Scale matters. In other words, if Bob has one die and Bill has two dice, then Bill doesn't have much of an advantage. However, if Bob has three dice and Bill has six, Bill does have something of an advantage (subject to point #1 above). And, if Bob has six dice, and Bill has twelve, Bill has a strong advantage (although point #1 is not entirely dead).

Hope that helps. Ian, I'm getting a skitchy feeling about these posts of yours. They have an undercurrent of anxiety that leads me to think you need to remember, Sorcerer is not a sacred game. It's just another role-playing game. I think it has some remarkable aspects, but no one expects you (and you shouldn't expect it of yourself) to understand and exploit every one of those aspects from the get-go.

I recommend going to the Sorcerer site, going to the Actual Play section (in the blue menus) and clicking on the links regarding Tor Erickson's game.

Best,
Ron

[Ben Morgan]

Good point, Ron. If you're giving player A the chance to roll for something, you have to be prepared for the fact that A) they might win, and B) they might lose. Some GMs have the unfortunate habit of forgetting one or the other of these. I've seen whole campaigns grind to a halt because a character succeeded at a roll when the GM was expecting them to fail.

-- Ben

[Ian O'Rourke]

I'll check out the Actual Play stuff as requested. In all honesty though, these two Sorcerer posts have come at the same tine but they are not related. I was not worrying about the statistics behind the system with respect to Sorcerer, but more for something I was thinking about in terms of Donjon Krawl which has a similar base system.

Probably should have explained that - as I have no problem with not knowing the stats under normal actual play circumstances. I was going to fiddle around with Donjon Krawl for something else and hence I was wanting to get a feel for consequences and scales.

As for Sorcerer being special, I agree, it's just a game, but then I view a number of games with a strong narrative bent at system level slightly scary (despire playing in that way in Actual Play). This is weird since I'm never consider myself bound by them. Odd. I'm not obsessed with it or anything, but these games exist, they are sort of a challenge to be conquered, for me. I may decide I'm better of, ironically, playing narrativist, but not having it at system level, which is fine also.

It's an experiment, that's all. Don't know till you've tried. I want to try Donjon Krawl and Inspectres at some point as well.