I don't understand this comment. The random "mechanic" in SGII is an *opposed*
roll, so isn't the result the *difference* between the rolls, not the rolls
themselves? In this context, I don't see how the performance of either set of
troops involved in an opposed roll can be called more predictable than the
other. Is the theory simply that more sides on the die automatically equals
less predictability?
The chances of a d8 rolling a higher, equal or lower number than a d6 are what
they are (56.25%, 12.5% and 31.25% respectively I think, though I'm no
mathematician), and I don't understand how there can be any difference in the
predictability of those odds depending on which "side" of the roll you happen
to be.
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think, in simple terms, the difference is that the die with more sides has
more effective results. Highest number attainable on a D6 is 6. You roll a D8,
sure the results are random, but your upper limit is greater to you can
generally count on that unit performing better overall.
-------------- Original message --------------
From: Robert N Bryett <rbryett@gmail.com>
> I don't understand this comment. The random "mechanic" in SGII is an
Robert Bryett replied to Samuel Penn:
> > Which brings me to my peeve of the randomness of the die mechanic.
I've been wondering this for years...
I suspect that at least part of it is a refusal to accept that having the
better quality (ie. bigger die) does not absolutely guarantee that you'll win
the opposed die roll. To me, comments like Samuel's (and I've seen quite a few
of them over the years) always give an impression of "My D10
rolled a 1 while his D6 rolled a 5, so my Veteran lost to his Greenie -
that's not fair! My troops are better, they're not *supposed* to lose!
:-("
- ie., they seem very much based on feelings, not on analysis of the
actual odds.
(Now, JA will undoubtedly tell me that good quality troops *don't* lose to
poor ones - but even in the situations he's been in, which I'd describe
in
game terms as D10+ quality troops with D8+ armour fighting D4 quality
troops with D4 armour, the high-quality guys still take
casualties occasionally - IOW, in game terms they still lose the
occasional opposed die roll.)
Regards,
I wasn't going to chime in on this, especially regarding the Close Combat
Weapons issue, but I have to now.
I agree with OA.
Played a game this Monday using a modified 5150/All Things
Zombie/Whatever system where for MOST actions you roll under your
troopers "rep" value. We were using D10s and most of my guys were rated at Rep
5. My buddy Tom was running guys who were mostly rated at Rep 4. In short, I
kicked the crap out of him. Figuratively, or perhaps miniaturatively speaking.
My unit was only 10% better than his.
My die rolls rocked. His die rolls sucked.
It happens. I've seen units with very heavy armor in DS3 get slammed by
something that should never have hurt them with a good impact roll vs a "1" on
the armor die. Shit happens. One hopes that the law of averages works itself
out and that *in general* you can, over a long period of time, predict
outcomes of battles based on die sizes. Within that
average outcome, however, there will be outliers - exceptions to the
rules - which explains a lot of "individual accounts" throughout
history.
:)
John
> Robert Bryett replied to Samuel Penn:
Oerjan
(Now, JA will undoubtedly tell me that good quality troops *don't* lose to
poor ones
Bullets are rather indeterminate at the whole morale class thing...they just
fly....)
You can be elite and having a bad day, it happens.
> On Jan 31, 2008, at 4:50 PM, John Lerchey wrote:
> Played a game this Monday using a modified 5150/All Things Zombie/
My hat off to you for putting up with that system. He lost me once CR2 came
out.
> One hopes that the law of averages works itself out and that *in
If you're hoping on the law of averages to save your butt you may as well pack
the boys up and go home.:)
D.
On Jan 31, 2008 2:31 PM, Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se> wrote:
> (Now, JA will undoubtedly tell me that good quality troops *don't*
I never said it doesn't happen.
I just say it happens too often in SG.
My Brigade took 94 killed in action in the span of 15 months.
During our last 9 months in Ramadi, when we took most of our casualties, our
estimates were that we killed roughly 1800 bad guys,
and detained 1200 (that were kept in detention--you always sweep up
more than you keep, they get sorted out in 72 hours or so).
Most of the guys we killed were with direct fire. Very few of our casualties
were from direct fire.
YMMV
> On Thu, January 31, 2008 20:31, Oerjan Ariander wrote:
I'd say no. Poor troops should be able to beat good troops if they have luck
on their side. I've lost very badly at times due
to bad dice[1], so I've sort of got used to it :-)
However, what I don't like is that if the d12 rolls badly, then a bad roll on
the d6 can still beat it. Where there's a big difference in troop quality, I
would prefer that the poorer quality troops have to do well in order to take
advantage of the good one's bad luck. This doesn't happen in SG. A bad roll
from good troops can result
in the other side's roll being almost meaningless - they're going
to win.
Your example is fine - the greens did very well, and the elites
did very badly. It's when the greens roll a 2 and still win that it seems
wrong.
Having said that, I think the SG mechanic does work well, and I haven't come
up with a way of improving it without complicating things. My complaint is a
theoretical one based on how I like mechanics to work.
[1] My worst example is in FT, where two dozen groups of heavy
interceptor fighters where wiped out by half their number of standard
fighters, with the standard fighters taking minimal casualties. That was good
luck on the part of my opponent, plus bad luck on my part. That was in a
single turn of dogfighting.
Chipping in my 2 cents worth...
I've toyed with the idea of using something like what is used in WRG ancients
(now Warrior) of using "regular" dice; d6 is 2,3,3,4,4,5
instead of 1-6. The Regular troops are less likely to do bad.
Untrained; d4 remains the same as probably Green d6, however for the rest, for
example d8 becomes 2,3,4,4,5,5,6,7 alternately you roll 2 d4s and add the
score.
Both approaches have difficulties; re-painting all your d8, d10 and d12
dice but keeping a second unchanged set for Firepower. For the other, it will
likely slow things down somewhat with separate rolls of Quality
dice.....
Cheers, Owen
> -----Original Message-----
> [mailto:gzg-l-bounces@lists.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU] On Behalf Of
> >> A bad roll from good troops can result in the other
> Samuel Penn wrote:
<snip>
> However, what I don't like is that if the d12 rolls badly, then a bad
<snip>
> It's when the greens roll a 2 and still win that
<snip>
Yes, but there is only a 1/72 chance of this happening.
Does it really seem that wrong that the chance of a wild shot from a
green to hit an elite that happens to have tripped/stumbled the wrong
way is about 1.3%?
How much lower would you like this number to be?
Cheers,
Steve
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Do get the the result of poor troops have to do very well to beat good troops
who have done very poorly can you just add a modifier to the base roll for
quality?
Green d6-1
Regular d6
Veteran d6+1
Elite d6+3
If armed with a CC wpn shift die type up 1. Power Armor rolls
2D6+quality
modifier.
So your elite power armor armed with flamer/shotgun is going to roll
2D8+3.
If he rolls double 1s and that green guy can roll a 6 he will beat him. Not
very likely but it 'could' happen.
I realize this is GZG heresy. Die type not linked to quality but I think it
would give the desired probabilities and not be to complicated.
My 2 cents. That Chuk Guy
[quoted original message omitted]
> On Thu, January 31, 2008 20:31, Oerjan Ariander wrote:
I can appreciate your point, Sam, but maybe you should just look at it as the
Vets screwed up a lot, while the greens screwed up a little less..... as
someone* once said, "victory goes to the side that f***s up NEXT to last..."
[* I think it was Mary Gentle that said it to me, but she may have
been quoting someone else!]
Jon (GZG)
> Having said that, I think the SG mechanic does work well, and I
> On Feb 1, 2008 7:12 AM, The Sutherlands <nishawn@charter.net> wrote:
Therein lies the issue that Oerjan et al have been saying. That's
entirely the _wrong_ way to look at it.
People are assigning a worth to each roll of the dice on both sides. One side
rolls good while the other side rolls bad, or one side rolls bad and the other
side rolls terrible. It's natural, of course, but that's not how you should
look at it.
You should look at the overall odds of success, period. It's the end result
that you need to worry about it, not the individual dice rolls that you took
to get there.
As Stephen pointed out, there's a 1.3% chance for a Green to beat an elite. If
you had a big chart that said "Green defeating Elite: 1 on a D100" and a Green
unit rolled a 01, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
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creating our Samurai game, we encountered a similar problem of die-size
and opposed rolls. In a counter-intuitive move we simply made "1" the
good
number and better units simply used smaller dice - Super Heroes got d4's
-
Peasants got d20's. SuperHeroes score a "1" 25% of the time and never
score worse than a 4 - peasants score "1" 5% of the time and only get 4
or
better 25% of the time - so it's possible a super hero will fail to a
peasant, but unlikely and the Superhero will consistently outperform classes
with lesser dice.
The alternative is to make custom dice - better classes use more
consistent dice (i.e. d4, d6) that are numbered according to their skill (high
skill = high numbers, low skill = low numbers)
FYI: Chessex does custom dice, albeit at $0.50 per printed side. (so a custom
d20 with 20 custom sides would be $10.00)
--Binhan
> On 2/1/08, Ground Zero Games <jon@gzg.com> wrote:
> The Sutherlands wrote:
Interesting idea. I can't resist replying to this comment though...
> I realize this is GZG heresy.
*Burn Him!!!!
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basic calculations:
Opposed die roll calculations
Player A vs. Player B
D6 vs D6
Player A has 41% chance of winning an opposed die roll (15 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
D8 vs D6
Player A has 56% chance of winning an opposed die roll (27 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
D10 vs D6
Player A has 65% chance of winning an opposed die roll (39 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
D12 vs D6
Player A has 71% chance of winning an opposed die roll (51 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
Overall the statistics look ok as a D12 unit should win at a ratio of almost
3:1 compared to a d6 unit which will win at less than the rate of 1:1. Which
makes the d12 unit roughly 3 times more effective than the d6 unit.
If you ignore ties, the numbers increase slightly:
Opposed die roll calculations
Player A vs. Player B
D6 vs D6
Player A has 50% chance of winning an opposed die roll (15 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
D8 vs D6
Player A has 64% chance of winning an opposed die roll (27 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
D10 vs D6
Player A has 72% chance of winning an opposed die roll (39 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
D12 vs D6
Player A has 77% chance of winning an opposed die roll (51 wins, 15 losses, 6
ties)
Overall the statistics look ok as a D12 unit should win at a ratio of 3:1
compared to a d6 unit which will win at the rate of 1:1.
Using this as a baseline, you would then need to determine if a d12 unit is 3
times better than a d6 unit and price them accordingly.
--Binhan
> On 2/1/08, Allan Goodall <agoodall@hyperbear.com> wrote:
> On Friday 01 February 2008 16:44:32 Allan Goodall wrote:
No it's not. I'm interested in how things work and why they give the results
they do, so it's the right way for me.
> People are assigning a worth to each roll of the dice on both sides.
I can look at it any way that interests me.
> You should look at the overall odds of success, period. It's the end
That depends on your point of view. I like looking at how a mechanic gets to
the result. I find it interesting. There's lots of games where the results are
okay, but I don't find the mechanics used to generate the results elegant. You
and Oerjan may not care about such things, but I do.
With the possible exception of vehicle armour (I'd prefer Nd12 rather than d12
x N), the results seem to work okay (I haven't played that much Stargrunt). In
some respects it's elegant, and works well, but when I step back and think
about it, I'd prefer the results were achieved a different way. Except, it
seems to be at a local maxima, and
any small modification (such as +/- to the die roll) seem to be worse.
> As Stephen pointed out, there's a 1.3% chance for a Green to beat an
Except you've totally misinterpreted Stephen's numbers (which stated the
chance of a particular roll, not the chance of Green winning, which is much
higher).
Even ignoring that, we'd be having a conversation about how I think high =
good, so a system where rolling low was good (Green are rolling in your
example) didn't feel right to me.
Bad rolls? Good rolls? In an opposed-die system, how can any roll
that *wins* be called bad? Rolling a two to beat an opponent's one is no
different from rolling a twelve to beat a six, except perhaps in the player's
head.
With opposed rolling, I believe that we have to let go of the idea that
somehow the number we roll represents the performance of our
troops; that rolling a six with a d6 represents super-heroic
performance, while rolling a five with a d12 means our troops are having an
off day. It seems to me that the odds are such that *any* result in which a d6
beats a d12 represents the green troops "doing well".
Best regards, Robert Bryett
> On 01/02/2008, at 19:55 , Samuel Penn wrote:
> However, what I don't like is that if the d12 rolls badly, then a