269
edits
Changes
no edit summary
=== Improving the odds ===
''A note on this section: I haven't calculated the probabilities here myself, but instead cheated and used the dicebot Thirst, which does simulates 10,000 rolls and then calculates the probability from that.''
* '''Critical Successes''' - Rolling two 10s is a critical success, which leads to four successes from two dice. This translates to a completely unintuitive probability curve as dice pools rise. As a result, a dice pool of 10 against Difficulty 5 has more like a 76% chance of winning than the 50% you might think. Likewise, a dice pool of 5 has ~8.5% chance of winning vs Difficulty 5 rather than the ~3% which might be expected. This explodes out as dice pools rise, such that at about seventeen dice, the probability get very, very wonky.
* '''Blood Surge''' - A starting neonate can gain two dice to most pools for only a Rouse Check. This turns an untrained person to a skilled one, and a skilled person to an expert. It also turns five dice vs Difficulty 5 to ''seven'' dice vs Difficulty 5, raising the odds to 30% success rate, from 8.5%.
* '''Willpower''' - Players can - and are strongly encouraged to - use Willpower to re-roll up to three non-Hunger dice, which greatly increases chance of success whenever the character is not very Hungry. e.g. ten dice vs Difficulty 5 becomes more like 88% chance of winning if three dice are re-rolled, and five dice vs Diff 5 becomes more like 32% chance. This is a massive difference. It's also really hard to intuitively grasp or predict, especially as someone may not be able to re-roll three dice due to their Hunger level - maybe they can only re-roll two, or just one, or none at all! (It's worth noting that SPCs can arguably use Willpower, but as it's probably not fun or typical to use them for every encounter, let alone the inherent disparities between resource expenditure in games for PCs compared with SPCs, so I'm disregarding this for the sake of this discussion.)
* '''Win at a cost''' - For any roll, including conflicts, a Storyteller can give the player an option to win their roll, but at a cost (which is agreed between player and Storyteller before accepting the offer). This means that you can safely put quite difficult tests in front of players if you have the means for them to suffer as a result of failure, whilst still not preventing the narrative from progressing. (See Corebook p. 121.)