Steps taken forward...

While thinking about the system used in Ji Dian Station, I came across an excellent essay on the mechanics of, and the numbers behind, the dice systems used in various game systems. Going closer to the root of the website reveals more essays and documents that cover game design.

Interesting food for thought.

I should be writing content, but there was a rule that I wanted to implement, but before I could do that, I needed to figure out the chances of success. I've said before that people who design games should have some grounding in math or, in the very least, the underlying concepts of probability.

In Ji Dian Station, tests are resolved by two 6 sided die, one is the Action die (AD) and the other is a Difficulty die (DD). You add your action modifiers, typically attribute plus skill, to your Action Die and compare that to your Difficulty die plus the difficulty. If your Action value is higher than the Difficulty value, you succeeded.

So I needed to figure out what the chance for succeeding, given those rules, if everything is even across the board. My highest completed match class in high school is geometry, which I enjoyed a lot of. I did not care for algebra 2 and eventually dropped the class.

Has this haunted me on occasions? Yes, it has.

Has it stopped me? Not at all.

So I never had a class that actually covered probability as a concept, though I understood it intuitively. To figure out the above problem, I speculate that someone somewhere has a nice neat formula for it. Unfortunately, I don't. So, I will rely on what I know and use the BF&I* technique to problem solving.

I have often said how much I love using Excel as an application. I use it for many things, including data transformation, character sheets, data graphs, middle ware, and so on. Today, I made a spreadsheet to calculate probability of success using Ji Dian Station's conflict resolution system. The meat of which is a VBA function that applies Action and Difficulty modifiers to the dice and figures out all of the permutations to calculate the probability of success in a given situation.

For example, if the modifiers are even, the chance of success is 41.67%. The test resolution system is a little more complex for that. It does make allowances for critical situations, critical successes and critical failures, you know, when things go really well or really bad. A critical failure is 1 on the AD and 6 on the DD, where as the other end of the spectrum is a 6 on the AD and a 1 on the DD. In the end, regardless of how good you are, there is a 2.67% chance of failure and regardless of how bad you are, there is a chance of success.

Yeah, I'm a geek. Get over it. :p

Okay, back to plot writing.

* The Brute Force and Ignorance Technique. Brochures that discuss this method are by the door on the way out.