For affecting another character I’m looking at having a target number that must be reached on one roll. The player rolls a die pool(The die pool is the same for every action) and then compare the number of successes he rolls to that of his target. The difficulty is determined by skill in use.

For more powerful weapons/attacks I’m looking at using a ratio of success of dice rolled to success applied to the target.

The available ratios for each level of attacks are as followed:
Minor
4-5
Medium
5-7
4-5
2-3
3-5
Major
5-9
1-2
2-5
Super
1-3
3-7

These should be running lowest to highest.

So for example if you have 3 successes at a 3-5 ratio you apply 5 to the target. If you have 3 on a 2-3 ratio you apply 4 successes to the target. If you have 6 successes you in a 3-5 you apply 10 to the target. At 2 successes into a 3-5 ration 2 successes are applied to the target.

Defense would work the same but either subtracted from the rolled or ratioed successes.

Now what I am wondering is if someone sees something that wrong with this mechanic.
Doe the math do something funny I’m not seeing?
Would you just not play a game like this?

I'm sorry. I'm not sure what you're saying. Could you explain your use of 'dice pool'? And how do you get a success? And what is the method behind applying successes to the target and ratio?

I'm sorry. I'd like to help but it's a little bit confusing, I think.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

Just offhand, with the information you've given, the effect of your payoff ratios "inflating" the number of successes should be similar, in terms of average (expected) successes per roll, to increasing the number of dice in the pool by the same proportion. Since an increasing dice pool is a fairly well-established way of representing increased effectiveness, you're on fairly safe ground overall.

I see a few potential problems to watch out for. One is the figuring. If I roll, say, 3 successes at a 5-7 ratio, it would appear to take a bit of fussy figuring to determine if my number of successes should round to 4 or to 5. (This problem could be avoided by using a table, but some players appear to dislike tables too.)

Also, you have either a typo or a math error in your ratios list, because 4-5 appears in Minor and then again in Medium. (The latter instance appears to be out of sequence mathematically.)

The actual outcome distributions will depend on what the actual die pool is, in terms of number of dice and the probability of rolling a success on a given die. By "the same for every action" do you mean the same for all characters, always? If so, can you tell us what that roll actually is? Or if it varies between characters, how might it look for a typical "low level" or less competent character versus a moderate or a super-effective character? One thing to watch out for is that some dice pool rolls have sharp peaks in their distributions -- that is, some particular possible number of successes that's extremely likely compared to all other possible numbers of successes. This could result in some steps in the attack-level ratio sequence (specifically, those where a rounding threshold is crossed when applied to the most likely number of successes) much more beneficial than others.

- Walt

Apologies for the lack of information, I tried to hit the fine line of enough info to answer the question and not too much to read and fell short.

Walt: Good to hear that you think this should work.
As for figuring part ratios it won't happen. If its a 5-7 you need 5 to move up to 7. Left over dice can still be added with a 1-1 ratio.
By the die pool being the same for every action I mean that for one character, no matter what he is doing, he will roll the same number of dice.
As for there being a sweet spot I think that would depend highly on the character in question though I can see there being definite best probability points at various times in the game. I don't think this should be a problem

So okay here some more stuff.

The dice are d10s with zeros being 10.
The characters have 2 important parts for this: Their Competence value and their Style/Skill value.

Competence is the die pool. It ranges from 3-5 for a low power character, 10 for mid power, and 18+ for a super powerful character. There is no limit on how high this can go. The dice are rolled at a difficulty 9unless modified by a Style/Skill.

Style/Skill represents the character knowledge of a particular fighting style or Skill. Each level in the skill lowers the difficulty by one. When the difficulty hits 2 it can be done without a die roll.
Styles and Skills can have moves or techniques to go with them. A move or technique adds the die ratio to the roll. Moves are a part of a Styles/Skills for determining the difficulty on the roll.

Minor and medium moves are at difficulty 9, Major at difficulty 11, and super techniques at difficulty 12.

So for example you have a Competence 5, Hidden Dragon style 3, and Dragon Punch(2-3 ratio medium move). You would roll 5 dice, at difficulty 6 (9-3 Style levels) every 2 dice that come up 6 can be used to activate the Dragon Punch at its 2-3 ratio. Any left over dice can just be added on at that point. So a roll of 3, 6, 8, 7, 10 you could put the 4 success into the Dragon Punch for a total of 6 success against the target. More then one move can be activated at a time for additional attacks/defense.

Edit: I have some reason for the repetition of the 4-5 ration because its on my paper notes as well but I just can't remember what it was at the moment.

As Walt said, the math should work just fine.

I'm curious as to what you see as the benefits of using the ratio's to bump up success levels rather than adding more dice.

If I'm following right you'd roll (say) 6 dice, get 3 successes and then with a 3-5 Ratio bump those 3 successes to 5.

What are your perceived benefits from doing that rather than simply adding an additional 4 dice...roll 10 dice get 5 successes.

Hey, :)

Right off the bat, the benefit is that a 5-7 ratio, for instance, isn't the same as taking a die pool of 10 and making it a fourteen, as a matter of averages, because of break points. 5-7 does not mean, take your number of successes and multiply by 7/5.

The way he has it set up is that, if you're rolling with a 5-7 ratio special move and you get four successes, that's neither 5 nor 6 nor 7 final successes, that's four, and only four. Only if you do get that fifth success, do you get to apply that special move to generate the extra two successes, for a final of 7.

I haven't worked the math in detail, but I am quite convinced that it's not the same as increasing the pool. For one thing, there's simply no way to get exactly 5 or 6 final successes. You either get 4 or you get 7.

Hmmm... ok, no, I guess I didn't explain this in a way that's any different from what tj has said... intuitively, it makes sense to me.

Anyway, also, I think the added color of specifying, 'yeah, dragon punch, baby!' is way cool! :)

Cheers,

J.

Hey João . You're quite correct that it isn't precisely the same because it definitely creates those break points. My question is an attempt to get to the rationale behind why those break points are desireable. What do they provide the game.

Aside from issues of broken math (which there don't appear to be any here) its impossible to judge how good or suitable a mechanic is without knowing what its supposed to do. If we know why TJ is thinking the ratio system is better than adjusting the size of the pool, we can better judge if its actually accomplishing those goals as written.

I have never really has a reason for doing this, I just thought of it and liked the look of it. Though I do have some misgivings about it, which is the reason for this thread.
I want a kind of anime/kung fu movie feel where its various styles and the possible techniques within them are as important as the character.
So the ratios seem to be want I want. A character can be judged by himself (Competence), by his Style, or by his moves as each one has separate advancements and depending on how the character advances he has different sweet spots to work for. Such as a move with a 5-9 ratio would do best with a high Competence character using it.

Also you can know the move but have a very hard time pulling it off until your competence/style gets to a high enough level at which point you can be said to have mastered the move.

Also you can know the move but have a very hard time pulling it off until your competence/style gets to a high enough level at which point you can be said to have mastered the move.

I had not clicked into using the ratios to that extent, the ratios I have used are rather randomly picked at this point.

I can see how a more controlled use of the ratios could add a lot to the move creation choices of the players. Between the con I'm at right now and the Iron Game Chef Its like to be around Monday before I get something sorted out on it.

Cool. I look forward to seeing it.

BTW: for clarity to future readers, my examples for the two more skilled fighters rolling 5 successes should both reference converting to 8 successes, not 5. The 5 was a typo.

Okay, a day late but here we go.

[code]
Ratio Percent Level
3:4 133.33 Minor
5:8 160 Medium
7:14 200 Major
9:21 233.33 Super
11:29 263.63 Secret
[/code]

This is the proposed set of basic move ratios that I have decided on. I have a Microsoft Excel spread sheet of all the values that I experimeted with that I can email to interested parties.

For each two increase in the dice needed to activate them 33% more dice are produced by the move.

Now lets look at some probabilities.
A character with the starting 5 Competnce and Style 1 (Styles starts at 0 but 1 level would be needed to get a move) to perform a move would only have 16% chance to do so (3d10 dice rolling 8 or higher out of 5 to get the 3:4).
Its not until the player reaches 9 Competence or 3 levels in a style that he can perform the move half the time.
9 dice @ 8 diff for 3:4 move. 53% chance of success.
5 dice @ 6 diff for 3:4 move. 50% chance of success.

While you have to buy 4 Competence for a starting character you only need to buy 3 Style levels. Its likely that most character will be one level of Style or Competence above this when entering play. So the initial probabilities to be what I want them to be. I'll have to do some more work Wednesday on this to set up a spreadsheet to let me easily compare different Style/Competence/Move combinations to see if this holds out.

Just as a point of interest here is an expanded list of ratios that might be put into the game for further choices. This table adds values between the 33% jumps at multiples of 25%
[code]
Ratio Percent
3:4 133.33
4:6 150
5:8 160
6:11 183.33
7:14 200
8:18 225
9:21 233.33
10:25 250
11:29 263.63
12:33 275
[/code]

After playing with the probabilities for a bit I like what I'm seeing at the moments. I'm going to need to work on the advancement costs of Styles and Competence but I think they should work out fairly well in the end.

Two things of note:
1) At high enough levels its mostly certain that you would succeed on an action. I'm thinking when its gets to 90% to perform a move you can just remove the required dice from the Competence pool and perform the move. The tactical side to this is you would want to keep dice in the pool for performing larger moves if you have them.
2) Certain break points in the probabilities could be used to provide titles for the character and more tangible benefits as well. This is something to look into for other parts of the game.

I think that's a good start. I suggest making up a "Style" and a bunch of moves and start having some fights to see how it works in play...tweak as necessary and then make up a few more and enough other stuff to start running some playtests.

Also I suggest rolling LOW on the d10s instead of high for successes. That way you can just roll equal to or under your Style without having to do the extra step of Target Number = 9-style.

I think that this is a really exciting way to integrate that kung-fu kitch/anime staple of "supermoves" and styles and to add some strategic depth to combat... good job!

Have you thought about including some risk aspect? It seems like your players will just roll their dice pool against their best style and then "declare" the most highly-leveraged move which the resulting # of successes allows. Maybe they should be required to declare the move they are attempting first so that if they attempt a high difficulty move and fail, they lose their abillity to convert successes into a less-leveraged move. Also, attaching some kind of persistant cost to declaring higher-leveraged moves might mean that even super-charachters aren't advantaged by whipping out the super-move first thing in every situation...

Which leads me to another thought... Is their a defensive equivalent? It would add a bidding aspect to the whole thing if a charachter attacked with an 8:18 level move had the opportunity to attempt an 8:18 defensive response to negate the attack or even a 9:21 defense to maybe negate plus some parrying damage. In this case, using a high-level attack and succeeding would force one's opponent to invest in a high-level defence if he wishes any chance of effective defence... so any defence leverage less than 8:18 would be unavailable when defending a successful 8:18 attack.

I am mostly thinking anime here, where combat starts with low-risk probing and jabbing, and eventually escalates to "grunting/flashing lights/powering up" supermoves and super blocks...

HereticalFaction, this is encouraging to see your enthusiasm for my project. I'm working on the escalating effect on this and I am having the player need a separate resource (gained through getting hit) to pull off the super/secret moves that is gained during a fight.

Yeah, you can get the ratios for defence or attacks. Now that I have this ready to go I'm working on banging out the rest of the combat system.

You got me thinking of maybe some kind of risk factor that goes down during the fight so you can try your super move near the start but later in the fight its less likely to hurt you. Yeah that has a good feel to it there.

I'm just coming to the end of my 2 week London/Endinburgough vacation I'll be back to working on this and should have something to test for the rest of the combat near the end of the month.