Hey everyone,

I ran the second session of my scenario for The Pool last night, and I have to say that if you'd been there, the one thing you'd have noticed is how difficult it was for the players to keep dice in their pools. Three of the four players, Matt, Tom, and Scott, bottomed out their pools during the first session, and spent the entire second session vacillating between zero and one or two dice. At zero dice, they'd take an action that gets them a die in their pool. On their next action they'd gamble it, hoping for a success and a MoV, and since they were often rolling just three to five dice in this situation, they were failing these rolls pretty regularly.

This was very challenging to me as a GM. Not only was I narrating the outcomes of the rolls they'd used to get a die in their pool, but I was repeatedly called on to narrate hosings when they'd bottom their pools out, again and again. By far the vast majority of outcomes to dice rolls were narrated by me. I narrated a hosing of Scott's character Grazel in which his ear was cut cleanly off by a Kriedetempek warrior, and another one where Grazel's charge through a combat scene unbalanced one of his mercenary allies in combat and resulted in that NPC taking two simultaneous sword thrusts from the Kriedetempek warriors he'd been defending against. I continually needed to push myself to think outside the traditional RPG box when narrating hosings, to introduce consequences when the player's intent was "to kill" the opponent that were not necessarily a killing or grievous injury to the character. It was insanely demanding, and I think recognizing how hard it was, the players started to offer suggestions each time the situation arose.

It's hard for me to know why the players were thrashing around so much at the bottom of the pool. I was very very aggressive with scene framing, in both this session and the first one. It's something I've been wanting to push the limits of, and learn to be good at. So it's possible that the situations they found themselves in were all so compelling and protagonizing that they didn't have much opportunity to take careful actions to get dice into their pools, because they so desperately wanted the MoV in every situation they found themselves in. It's also possible they're so insanely curious about the MoV that they wanted opportunities to learn what it could do, and push its limits.

It was fun to have to push my creativity so hard narrating outcomes, but going into the session I was expecting the players would be far more aggressive with their authorial power than they had been during the first session. And in actuality, I think they were definitely interested in being aggressive. It just didn't materialize for them the way they'd all hoped. And the result was a certain amount of evident frustration for them.

I'm thinking about replenishing all their pools up to starting levels for the next session, as an experiment at how quickly they bottom them out now that they're more experienced players. But that's not really a solution. And although I have ideas, I'm not sure exactly how to solve the problem.

I do think Scott's handling of pool management is particularly instructive. One technique he used was to ask for a scene and gamble for an MoV that he used to create the innuendo of an NPC being complicit with his character's killing of Sgt. Aminar Korg in the first session. It positioned him for greater effectiveness in handling subsequent events to have invented this relationship, because he'd be able to twist and influence the NPC in ways that would make enough sense to the narrative that I wouldn't call for a die roll. He got a lot of permanent potential bang from that one MoV.

Another technique he used, when he didn't have any dice in his pool, was to ask for a trait roll to have an NPC do something. His character Grazel had been hosed and disarmed by a Kriedetempek. Scott asked for a die roll, explaining that Grazel's perceived "reliability" was from his shared closeness with other mercenaries, and that one of the NPC mercenaries nearby would turn to kill the Kriedetempek that was on Grazel out of the shared relationship of mutually relying on each other. It was a stretch of that trait, but cool enough that I allowed it, and it worked so well on his behalf and contributed so well to the narrative that during character creation for The Pool in the future I'll probably use it as an example of why players should strongly consider traits that create ties between their characters and others. I'm thinking of it now as kind of The Pool equivalent of Kicker integration with a relationship map.

Still, they did struggle at replenishing their pools, even Scott. We had a discussion about it after the game session, and beyond Scott's techniques for getting the most out of his character's pool by creating linkages with NPC's, I suggested that they needed to get comfortable asking for scenes, and asking for flashbacks, to ask for trait rolls associated with those scenes and flashbacks that build and reveal the character in the context of the developing narrative and add dice to the character's pool. I'm thinking of this now as the real augmentation mechanic for The Pool. It's what creates the character.

And when I think about it, each of these three techniques for effective use and management of a player's pool hinges on player-NPC connections.

Whaddya think? Is it possible to be an island in the pool, and still be effective? How have your players been effective or ineffective at managing their pools? Can you discern anything that may have been a problem with the way I was running the game?

Paul

[ This Message was edited by: Paul Czege on 2001-09-25 16:33 ]

Well, from the point of view of someone who's read but not played The Pool, it seems to me that by far the most effective way to not spend all your time "thrashing about at the bottom of the pool"¹ is to suck it up, not take the MoV, and expand your pool up to a level where you can gamble it all and have a good chance of success or gamble part of it and have a decent chance of success. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the intention of The Pool is to make MoV's moderately rare, memorable, and exciting, something that you do when you're seriously committed to a scene and want a memorable and lasting victory, not the result of most successful rolls.

If your players feel like they need MoV's on most rolls, it may be because they perceive a high threat level of the game, and feel like they need every last advantage they can squeeze out of the succesful roll. In which case, if you toned down the intensity a little bit, they might spend less time down there.

Or maybe it's just that they wanted to try out a cool new system, and, with a bit of experience, they'll be more, uh, cautious managers of their pools.

Epoch

¹ Nice phrase. :smile:

I assume that you've read the flipping the pool thread where I define Anti-Pool? The "thrashing" phenomenon is exactly why I came up with Anti-Pool. I haven't played either version, but I predicted the thrashing problem statistically. Essentially the problem is that the way to get the best chance to succeed is to spend all your dice every time. Over time you'll have more successes than if you ration them out. The problem is when the failure does occur then the character is left diceless and "Deprotagonized". Getting back up to a reasonable level will be difficlt unless the player doesn't want an MoV for a long while.

Anti-Pool solves that. Any chance you might try a scenario with Anti-Pool instead? Just to see how it differs?

Mike

It's actually an interesting thing to study The Pool.

Let's suppose that you have three rolls in a row, and a nine die pool, plus, for each roll, you'll have two dice base (ie, either gifts from the GM or from your traits). What's the optimal strategy, the most likely to get you the most success?

That's non-trivial to figure out. There are a lot of possible outcomes. (It's even more complex if you add a utility to having dice in your pool after the final roll).

One possible approach is to bet all 9 dice with every roll. So, that gives you an 86.5% chance of the first success. Then, on your second roll, you have an 86.5% chance of being able to get another 86.5% chance of success, and a 13.5% chance of having only a 30.5% chance of success. Then, on the third roll, you've got, uh, lesse, a 74.8% chance of being able to get an 86.5% chance of success, and a 26% chance of being able to get a 30.5% chance of success.

Would it make sense, then, to say that, following that strategy, your expected successes are:

.865 + .748 + .647 + .041 + .013 = 2.314 successes, on average?

If so (and check my math, because I'm one of those people who likes to do Monte Carlo simulations whenever possible), then that's the number to beat. If you can, then that at least somewhat implies that the "thrashing at the bottom" problem is a problem of players not utilizing the system, while if you can't, it implies that it's a system problem.

Right?

Hey Mike,

I assume that you've read the flipping the pool thread where I define Anti-Pool?....Any chance you might try a scenario with Anti-Pool instead?

There's definitely a chance. I thought Anti-Pool was a very interesting concept, and I'd like to see how it played out. Right now I'm not sure what I'm going to run next. I'd like to run The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, but a compelling situation and setting has yet to present itself to me. I thought Alex Knapik's $2,059 in Dead Presidents on Gaming Outpost was an interesting setting, but I'd never use GURPS for it, and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil isn't really suitable. Anti-Pool is definitely a contender for that. But after Scott's Sorcerer game, and all the Sturm und Drang in my current scenario and in world events, I'm really ready for something way lighter. Right now I'm thinking either my own Servitude for Wuthering Heights or Elfs.

Still, regarding The Pool, I think it's early to say it's broken. I've only run two sessions. It's possible as players gain expertise with pool management and the techniques for getting things done by way of NPC's that I wrote about in my first post, the thrash-phenomenon will go away. It's also possible that I'm an overly brutal GM and other GM's won't see the same pool management dynamic at all. And beyond that, James V. has emailed me ideas he's exploring for tweaking the rate that dice flow into a player's pool, and they're pretty inspired.

Paul

[ This Message was edited by: Paul Czege on 2001-09-25 21:36 ]

Uh, Mike, if I can find the spreadsheet with all the possible combinations would you like to see it (I can probably work it up real quick even if I can't find the old one)? I ran it for all the base dice combinations. I garuntee you that given a starting pool of sufficient size that it makes more sense to use all the dice every time. Sure you will run out more quickly, but you'll have way more successes using the all the dice all the time method in total. The second best method is to use just one. That means you'll take longer to run out, but you'll fail at most of the attempts. So your expected results look something like either:

Win, Win, Win, Win, Win, Win, Win, Win, Lose

Or:

Win, Lose, Lose, Win, Lose, Lose, Win, Lose, Lose, Win, Lose, Lose, Win, Lose

And the middle is even worse, usually. Which would you prefer?

And either way, you eventually end up at the bottom of the Pool thrashing about. Other than the ability for the GM to really hose the players at that point, and it being strenuously challenging, I haven't heard anything good about that part of the game.

This does not mean that The Pool is broken, however. Actual significance of events make some worth more than others. Therefore you can play around with these numbers some. I think it actually just makes for a cerain type of cycle.

Anti-Pool just makes for a different cycle, a constant flow back and forth. You win, then you lose. Any level of bet makes sense, because you have incentive to go each way. Go high and burn your protagonism to be sure of something, or go low risking failure but get dice back if you do. I like the control over protagonism that would give the player.

BTW, in the spirit of full disclosure, and for those that haven't worked it out like Mr. Sullivan, here's the short form,

Total--Chance of
Dice---Sucess
1------16%
2------31%
3------42%
4------52%
5------60%
6------67%
7------72%
8------77%
9------81%
10-----84%
11-----87%
12-----89%

Depending on how many dice you are actually risking you can calculate the number of times that you can roll before you can expect to run out. Multiply that total by the success rate above and you get the number of successes in that chain.

Mike

[ This Message was edited by: Mike Holmes on 2001-09-25 23:27 ]

Yeah, I think I would like to see it, 'cause the back-of-the-envelope math I just did indicates that it's better not to use your full pool in a three-run set.

Though I haven't been taking into account the possibility of adding dice to your pool through successes.

Hah-hah. No, you don't need to send the spreadsheet. I've convinced myself that you're right -- at least without thinking about getting new dice for the pool, the best tactic is always to use all of your dice.

I was thinking about it some more, and I have an even more compelling argument for those who might still be doubters.

My original analysis is based on the idea that you'd plan out all of your expenditures before hand. But since you can reconsider in between rolls, you have to consider that in what kind of decision will be made. Once you have made a successful roll (assuming that you're using the "roll em all" tactic) then the odds reset. You have the same incentive that you had originally 89% to succeed and lose nothing. The odds of failure do not increase. So unless you are deciding all of your rolls at the beginning of the game, you have a constant strong incentive to use all your dice. This is of course more true in cases where you really want to succeed and have that additional incentive to roll everything. Or in other words rolling just a few would only occur for very unimportant things and with nothing important on the horizon. Not very often the case in a RPG, especially one that wants you to only roll in important circumstances.

Mike

Here's a beter way of looking at it. However Paul's players played in the actual example, they ran out of dice in the first session and had none for the second. This is inevitable without giving up more MoV's than you take and still likely then. And that is the real problem. Once they are thrashing they have a very strong incentive to stay thrashing which is that they want their MoV's. And the number of successes and MoVs generated by this method are about the same as if you decided to just bet one die and then forgo the next MoV all the time as a method of maintaining your pool (though that system does allow you a big kick when you need it. But then you're back to thrashing after a while).

As I said before, this isn't an indiation that the system is broken. It just means that you are going to have this cycle where protagonism is determined by the available methods. If the cycle of starting with a bunch of successes and then having a long bad time in which the GM gets to make up a lot of the resolution appeals to you, then The Pool it is. I just prefer a different cycle that bounces back more quickly.


Mike

Hmmm

Here are two ideas I have for tweaking the rules:

1) Everytime you roll a one, you get to add a die to your pool. If you can take an MoV, it costs you one die. If rolled 2 ones, then you can still get a die for your pool and do the MoV.

2) At the start of each new session, each player starts with 15 dice and subtracts 2d6 from that number. This gives you a range of 3-13 startind dice for each session, an average of around 8 or so.

What do you guys think of those changes? I don't want to get drastic. Having a large pool renders the dice less valuable. Having no dice renders the game pointless. I'm going to try it this way in my next session on Monday. As I told Paul, I haven't ran into this problem in my group yet.

Mike, didn't you email these probabilities back when I first posted the game? Interesting. I hate to quote Star Wars, but I'm goint to do it anyway: never tell me the odds.

The game is about fast, loose play. Gambling, losing, winning, these are all part of it. Getting to control things in moments of tension. All of it. I want to tweak the rules to the point that the "thrashing" problem is much, much less evident. Actually, it needs to be eliminated. Getting down to no dice is something that ought to happen from time to time, but not every damn game!

One thing I certainly don't want to see is a rigid strategy for die rolling. Screw that. That's not how I would want to have to play any game. And if the current rules support that kind of thing, then I need to change them.

I'm starting with the simple changes I detailed above. I believe they can be smoothly integrated with the way the game is played since they are not seperate forms of mechanics, but merely a simple use of what's already there. These two rules ought to result in more dice in players' pools, but not *too* many more.

James V. West

P.S. What's "Anti-Pool"??? Is there a thread on it here? I must be blind...

James,

The Anti-Pool is, indeed, a threat hanging around somewhere. In brief, it is Mike Holmes' suggestion to reverse how the Pool deals with things -- instead of losing dice on a failure and gaining dice on success, he proposes that you lose the gambled dice on a success and gain a die on a failure.

If you wish to not support a single style of die rolling, I suggest that you do not implement the "get as many dice as you have 1's" rule. That strongly supports the strategy of rolling all of your (large) pool as you possibly can, every time, because, for the first time in The Pool, it's not just success, but degree of success which matters, and only with large pools will you ever get much in the way of multiple ones.

[ Editted because I made the world's most obnoxious typo -- substituting "loose" for "lose. ]

[ This Message was edited by: Epoch on 2001-09-26 19:09 ]

Excellent point. Thank you for hitting me upside the head with it. One of the most important things about the idea for this game was that it was a simple "if you see a one, you win" kind of thing. No counting. Good call.

That leaves me with the die replenishing method, which I think still holds true to the feel of the game.

So, in the anti-pool idea you get dice for failing and loose them for succeeding? Let me think about that for a minute.

In that case, if you win a roll you lose how many? One die? Then you have to buy an MoV, so that's 2 dice gone for every sucess. For every failure you get one die? I can see it working, but I'd have to think on it more. The one thing about it that I don't like (if I'm understanding it, which might not be the case :wink:) is that the gambling is less interesting. If I gamble dice and win, do I loose them? If I don't gamble, or gamble low, and lose, I get more dice. Then, if I go for broke and gamble them all, where's the idea of risk? Am I getting anti-pool right, or am I misinterpreting?

I think the problem boils down to a simple matter of odds, as Mike pointed out. Odds are you'll fail when you roll few dice. If you fail, you loose more dice. So to fix that problem the odds would have to be tweaked up a bit. How?

Having larger pools? That means gambling will be more common. Ok, no big deal. BUt would the same problems then creep up because folks are throwing more dice in the roll, or would the problem lessen because they are winning those rolls more often? I'm getting a headache.

James V

Has anyone thought about simply making traits cheeper during character creation? As it stands, if I min-maxed my character to have only 3 traits with dice I would have at best 2d a piece and a Pool between 1 and 4. The way I see it, my character wouldn't be much more skilled at those traits than he is at something he is trying for the first time with no dice. That means that my chances of success and failure rely almost entirely on fate and my keen gambling sense. I think being able to start the game with a 3 or 4 in at least a few traits would make a significant difference - especially if you bottomed out.

,Matt

Mike's original idea for the anti-pool was that you lose all the dice you used (from your pool, of course, not your traits) if you win the roll.

Example: You have a trait of 2 dice and 6 dice in your pool. You elect to use 3 dice from your pool.

If you win the roll, you lose those three dice, and now have only 3 dice left in your pool. You make a MoV, or you may choose to take a die (so you end up with four dice in your pool).

If you lose the roll, you get an additional die in your pool, bringing you to 7 dice in the pool.

It's much less of a "gambling" concept and more of a "consolation prize" concept. There's always a good and a bad side to any roll. Either you win the roll and lose some dice or you lose the roll and win some dice.

The Anti-Pool flip-flop idea is interesting. What we’re dealing with is this: The Pool stresses risk, Anti-Pool stresses balance. I can see both working well, but with different feels. Obviously I like the feel of the risk factor. That’s why I designed it that way. Its my preference. I don’t like games in which I don’t feel like there’s something to be lost. However, I don’t like games in which you feel like you just can’t win. I don’t want The Pool to be one of those games.

Eloran mentioned making Traits cheaper. I don’t think that would solve this problem. If you did that, and each player then started the game with more dice but still kept the same amount from game to game, the problem would persist. I do see your point that higher bonuses in some Traits would make it considerably easier for players suffering bad luck. Good point. But the cost system has to be intuitive. No charts, no complexities. Either cost equals bonus (too cheap) or cost equals bonus times bonus (expensive, yes). For now, I’m with keeping with the current cost system.

I’ve been thinking about this problem non-stop since Paul emailed me about it. Maybe the solution isn’t as complicated as I first thought it was going to be.

The problem lies in players’ pools getting emptied too quickly. When you create a character, you get 12 dice and then you spend some of those and you use the remaining dice in your first session. Ok, that leaves an average of about 5 dice for a starting character. Five dice for an entire session of play obviously isn’t going to cut the mustard. It needs to be more.

I think of each session as a chapter in a story. In each chapter, characters do things and some of those things are more important or memorable than others. So it makes sense that you’d have a finite pool to draw from and that at the end of a chapter you might be broke. Maybe you went out with a bang, or you went out with a floop. The problem that Paul has expressed is that at the beginning of each session his players already have little or no dice, then with the 1d6 roll that only boosts them about 3 or 4. So they’re probably starting a game with 4 dice in their pools. That sucks.

I think that at the beginning of each session, just like a new chapter of a book, the pools get reset. Each player gets to start with a fresh and generous pool of effectiveness and they can then make decisions about how to gamble those dice throughout the chapter. This would work best if the GM were actually thinking in terms of chapters, resetting the pools after each chapter has finished. Perhaps more than once per session depending on how the story is being paced.

It seems to me that this is a viable solution to the problem. New chapter, new pool.

How many dice to reset to? Perhaps this is a question that needs to be answered by each individual group. I can offer suggestions based on experience, but that experience is still being developed so right now I’d have to throw out some arbitrary numbers based on intuition:

12 dice gives you the ability to make the max gamble of 9, and still have a few left if you fail. But it keeps the pool small.

12 plus 1d6 gives a slight boost and a certain amount of randomness and anticipation at the start of the game.

15 dice is a generous number that might make players more apt to gamble early.

I’m a bit leery of starting higher than 12, but I’m keen on the idea of getting 12 plus some.

Either way, this process lets players who have suffered bad luck get back on track in shorter time but doesn’t reduce the risk of bad luck too much to render the risk factor impotent. Make sense?

I’d really love to hear your opinions on this. When I designed the game, I was keeping the figures low intentionally and I knew that I might have to do some tweaking later. Now I’m tweaking.


James V West

Paul mentioned a couple of serious potential flaws in the idea I mentioned above:

1) Not every group will play "chapters" the same way. Some chapters will be more intense and require/induce more gambling while others will be less game-intensive and more drama-intensive, thus calling for less rolling.

2) Players may fall into a habit of waiting for a cue from the GM as to when a chapter will end and then using dice like mad, casting a kind of "meta-gameish" shadow over the story.

Good points, Paul. I'm not sure yet if this will shoot my idea out of the water, but it might.

James V West

James and all,

OK, first off, I think that The Pool as written is a fine game, and that's the last time I'll say it as I've now put it in several threads. First off your experience, James, has been that players do not bottom out consistently. And even when they do, as Scott Knipe attests in the Metagame resource thread, the game still contiues to work. It just takes on some different characteristics. Which might, for all I know, be the best way to play.

FWIW, the risk in the Anti-Pool is in trying to succeed while rolling low amounts of dice so that you don't deplete your pool. You have an incentive to do so in that failure means that you get dice. So, yes the risk is more balanced, but it still exists. In regular The Pool, there is a best choice given the number of dice available. For example, with a large number of dice rolling them all makes the most sense whether or not the task is important from a gambling perspective. Unless you don't mind failing and losing dice.

Interestingly, it is true of all gambling on something with a fixed number of results that there is always a best strategy. So when playing craps, or blackjack, etc. there is a best way to play. In casinos playing the best way will end up with you losing about 1% or so of your money bet over time on the average (depending on the exact rules in play). This is how casinos make money. In fact with blackjack, you can use a best practice of counting cards that can over a very long time make you money (under the best circumstances about 2%) assuming that you don't get thrown out first, which you will unless you are Dustin Hoffman.

Often people are unaware that there is a best method to playing these games and on the average they lose their money much faster, many believeing that by going with premonitions they can do better than any statistical strategy. This is not supported scientifically, however, and the casinos do very well, you'll notice. This is one thing that may cause people to not use the best strategy in The Pool, in addition to the facts that some victories are more important than others, some people might want to fail, and the fact that there are methods to gain dice automatically (something you can't do in a cassino). And also that losing dice just leads to a different story, not actual financial loss. But to that extent, then we are dismissing the idea of it being a gamble. If you want the pressure, you have to accept players looking for the best strategy.

And if I hadn't blurted it out, Sullivan or somebody else would have at some point. :razz:

The balance (the consolation prize) in Anti-Pool makes it so that any level of expenditure may be acceptable given a level of importance of the roll. So players will make different choices more often based on the needs of the story, rather than the best gambling strategy. This may appeal to some. What it does is put the player back in more control (or at least prevents him from having conflicting priorities), and paces the game that way. I posited it pretty much soley to discuss other ways that such a mechanic could be constructed, and what effects doing different things with it might have. I've been very pleased with the responses so far.

The Pool, OTOH (and I think possibly much more interestingly), by giving the player conflicting priorities drives the story along on it's own cycle whaen the player gambles. Note that he can refuse to gamble much and take more control. If the cycle it generates, however, turns out to be a good one, then I wouldn't change anything. You'll have found a way for a metagame mechanic to pace a story for in a semi-random manner. That's really a cool idea. This is essentially what I'm looking to discover in the Metagame Resources thread.

The only doubt I have about The Pool's ability to pace really effectively is that I don't think that you did any really careful analysis before deciding on the particualar numbers or methods and just went on instinct. Which I think has served you well, but might possibly be tweaked. This is why I'm excited to see you looking into it more closely. Even just discussing possibilities may lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon.

OK, that was to wordy. To summarize, The Pool is cool, and so is Anti-Pool and other discussons arising from it. Howzat?

Mike

On 2001-09-27 18:24, James V. West wrote:
Paul mentioned a couple of serious potential flaws in the idea I mentioned above:

1) Not every group will play "chapters" the same way. Some chapters will be more intense and require/induce more gambling while others will be less game-intensive and more drama-intensive, thus calling for less rolling.

2) Players may fall into a habit of waiting for a cue from the GM as to when a chapter will end and then using dice like mad, casting a kind of "meta-gameish" shadow over the story.

Thanks for the analysysyis (anilysisiys?) Mike.

Yeah, The Pool was pure gut instinct. I don't like calculations.

Upon further thought, the only real change I'm considering making at this point is to allow players to roll 2d6 instead of 1d6 at the start of each chapter, that being added to their total carried over from the previous chapter. Not a huge change, but it's certain to give players more dice on average.

The other ideas I've come up with all suck. I don't like any of them for one simple reason: they aren't integrated. Even the idea I just mentioned isn't really what I want. I'm not convinced that there needs to be any major alteration, but if I make one, it will be something fully integrated into the existing structure.

So for now, I'm sailing on with my game design and I'll see what develops in time. I'm playing again Monday night. I'm planning a session that ought to induce a lot more die rolling and thus more gambling. We'll see what happens :wink:.


Later

James V. West

Hey Mike,

Total--Chance of
Dice---Sucess
1------16%
2------31%
3------42%
4------52%
5------60%
6------67%
7------72%
8------77%
9------81%
10-----84%
11-----87%
12-----89%

How difficult would it be to do the same math for a Pool variant that used four-siders instead of six-siders?

Paul

1---25.00%
2---43.75%
3---57.81%
4---68.36%
5---76.27%
6---82.20%
7---86.65%
8---89.99%
9---92.49%
10--94.37%
11--95.78%
12--96.83%
13--97.62%
14--98.22%

And before anybody asks, here's the same for D8 and D10,

Dice--D8------D10
1----12.50%--10.00%
2----23.44%--19.00%
3----33.01%--27.10%
4----41.38%--34.39%
5----48.71%--40.95%
6----55.12%--46.86%
7----60.73%--52.17%
8----65.64%--56.95%
9----69.93%--61.26%
10---73.69%--65.13%
11---76.98%--68.62%
12---79.86%--71.76%
13---82.38%--74.58%
14---84.58%--77.12%
15---86.51%--79.41%
16---88.19%--81.47%
17---89.67%--83.32%
18---90.96%--84.99%
19---92.09%--86.49%
20---93.08%--87.84%

Mike

That's food for thought. Thanks.

Actually, the formula is simple for anyone who wants to calculate any other die or any number of them.

P = 1-((n-1)/n)^d

This returns the probablity of success "P" where "n" is the highest number rollable on the die, and "d" is the number of dice rolled. For those not familiar with programming, "^" means "raised to the power of".

The ((n-1)/n)^d part alone is the chance of failure.

Mike


(edited because I originally posted the formula as (n/(n-1))^d which is incorrect, a fact that I noticed after I saw Mike do it right below. Whoops, going too fast! Sorry for any inconvenience.)

[ This Message was edited by: Mike Holmes on 2001-10-05 17:23 ]

Hey Mike, I bet all the kids made fun of you in math class. "hey look, there's calculater boy!". :wink: Just ribbing. Thanks for the breakdowns, but how do you figure in the fact that you're rolling several dice and not just one? I mean, it seems to me that if you were rolling percentile dice, then that's just one roll. But rolling a handful of dice gives you a handful of opportunities for different results, doesn't it? Maybe that's not mathematically sound thinking, but it makes good horse sense.

I like the odds, by the way. Even a big ole handful of dice doesn't mean a guarantee of success, while a small handful doesn't mean definite failure. Just the way I like it.

D4s represent both the beauty and the evil of dice. Four-siders are clumsy. They have two redeeming qualities: 1) they give you quarter results and 2) they look like pyramids. But holding a handful and rolling them sucks.

Now, there are many ways to tweak a game. I *could* do any one or several of the following:

1) Build the game around blank d6s with dots on only two sides. That increases your odds by a factor of 1/6.

2) Say that a one or a six are both successes. Then add some funky rule that says you can only get a MoV on a one.

3) Give 2 dice per success instead of 1, thus doubling the flow of dice into the pool without adding any goofy new rules.

4) Add dice to the pool based on traits used in the last game.

And many, many more.

The crux of the problem for any chnage in the rules is this: there can be no scaling.

Scaling, as in counting successes for example, means that invariably one style of playing is going to prove more "successful" than another. For another example, say I create a better dice-refilling mechanic by saying you get dice equal to the bonus of the Trait you used in the roll. Well, automatically players will tend to use one or two Traits as often as possible and ignore opportunities to use their Traits with smaller bonuses (or none at all). No good.

Say I reverse that, and say that you get something like 4 dice per success *minus* your Trait bonus. Well, in that case, no one would ever add a bonus to a Trait. Period.

So, there can be no scaling. It has to be a flat black and white mechanic. YOu roll a one, you succeed. YOu don't you fail. That's it. You succeed you get a die or a MoV. That's it.

Now, I realize that by looking at it statistically you can argue that betting high every time is a better way to go. All I know is this: I've ran three sessions, no one ever bet more than 3 dice on any roll and no one ever lost all their dice. Why? A couple of reasons.

a) Not a lot of dice rolling. There was a lot of drama going on and the players felt they didn't need to do any gambling in most cases. But when the tension mounted, they threw the dice. Rates of failure and success were about even in most cases, adding to the game's drama.

b) No excessive hosing. If someone bet a bunch of dice and lost, sure, the failure should be significant. But if they only have one or two dice and they lose them, there's no real need for a serious hosing. Just call it a failure. The way I typically handle failures is to go with the mood of the scene. If I feel like the story would be better served to say the failure was a kind of success wrapped in a failed attempt, then so be it. Maybe someone was trying to do one thing, which certainly failed, but casused something beneficial to happen at the same time. Its a story game first and foremost.

In fact, on the issue of failures...

When I run this game, I find myself thinking that "failure" isn't the right word for a failed roll. When no dice are being cast, its simple drama and storytelling, right? When you roll you're prize is to be successful and to get a die or MoV. A failed roll usually results in losing some dice and that's bad enough. So, I often tend to treat failed rolls as a chance for me, the little ole GM, to let the event play out as *I* would like it to. That doesn't mean kill the PCs, it means make a cool scene.

And it isn't just with The Pool that I do this. I've always done this even with the most anal retentive games I've ever played (like GURPS).

I'm paying very close attention to the language I'm using in writing my game. The current version of The Pool is not perfect. It needs revision not in rules, but in language. Once I've finished writing The Questing Beast and I think the rules sound the way they are intended to be used, I'll put up a revised and more insightful (hopefully) version of The Pool.

You guys have been extremely helpful in all this. Thanks!

James V. West
http://www.geocities.com/randomordercreations/index.html

P.S. and thanks for letting me ramble on

James,

Essentially, here's the logic behind Mike's formula.

Your odds of success are equal to your odds of not failing, right? And it's pretty clear that, with a single d6, your odds of not failing are 5/6, right?

Okay, now suppose you have a lot of d6's. Instead of rolling them all at once, let's suppose that you rolled them one at a time.

So, you get the first roll. It could be a 1, in which case we don't care what the rest of the dice roll, or it could be a 2-6, in which case we do. So, the second roll could be 1 through 6 for each face of the first roll (that is, you could roll a 3 on the first die and a 2 on the second, and that's a different roll from 3 on the first die and 4 on the second). We count up all the failures -- there's a 5/6 chance of failure on the second die for every (failing) face on the first die -- or (5/6) * (5/6).

Add a third die to that, and you've got a 5/6 chance of failure for every combination of the first die, or (5/6) * (5/6) * (5/6).

Obviously, there's a pattern, here. If you roll a series of dice, your odds of failure are (5/6) ^ n, where n is the number of dice you rolled.

If you use 1 - (5/6) ^ n, that's your chance of success, since everything that's not a failure is a success.

Now, the final thing we realize is that it doesn't really matter whether we roll them in order or not. The dice don't relate to one another in any way -- so we could arbitrarily say, "that one's the 'first' die, that one's the second," etc. even if we roll them all at once. Since there's no difference between rolling them in sequence or all at once, the (5/6) ^ n formula must also be the chance of rolling a failure with a bunch of dice thrown at once.

Whoops. First of all I made a mistake in my formula. The stats I posted are correct, just not the formula. It is now corrected and anotated. So, if that caused any confusion, I apollogise.

Secondly, I've never advocated either hosings based on level of expenditures (although I did argue with somebody that, if you did that, you should instead base it on the number of dice bet for several reasons). I also have never advocated making the level of success based on the number of ones rolled. I'm not against a system producing such figures, however, I agree with James that, in combination with this particular system, you may get problems.

What you suggest James is essentially a D3. Work out the stats yourself to see what effect this has, or just check the difference between D6 and D4 to see where the trend takes you. Interestingly, there are a few games that use D2 (AKA coins) to produce the same kind of effects. In general, it would seem like you'd need more if you used these. I think that the bigest advantage of D6's is that they are common. Anyhow, changing dice type just shifts the curve without really changing any of the dynamics. The same strategies hold for any sized die in this case.

Which is why I wonder what Paul is up to?!?

In any case, you'll notice that as the die pool gets bigger you get diminishing returns, FWIW. Each further die means less in terms of success (but are still worthwhile strategy-wise). Just a note.

Mike

James,

Something you mentioned earlier has me wondering whether I understand The Pool correctly. You said starting with 12 dice would allow a player "to make the max bet of 9." Is this a rule you're contemplating, or did it come up earlier in this thread (in which case I've simply missed it)? I don't see anything in The Pool about a limit on the number of dice one can gamble.

Thanks,

Blake

Blake:

Nine is the limit of dice you can gamble from your pool on a single roll. This doesn't count the dice you get from the GM and from Trait bonuses. Its in the rules, but I think I only mention it once.

I actually put nine dice in my hand and felt like it was a comfortable maximum. Any more and you can't do a one-handed roll. Plus nine just felt like a natural limit, so I went with it.

Thanks

James V. West

Thanks, James!

-B.