Critical Success and Failure

[GrayPennell]

I know that some people have taken issue at the ways critical success is handled. How can you have a better chance at critical success as the difficulties get higher? Well I have thought about it and I ll have to agree with one of my favorite writers Terry Pratchett

"Traditionally, one has to say "it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!" to invoke this rule. It also has to be exactly a million to one - none of this fiddly "995,351 to 1" business, or whatever other number you might end up with. So while the list of things that people have accomplished with million to one chances is quite impressive, the list of things they have failed to accomplish with odds a few percentage points off in either direction is probably a lot longer and involves a lot more fatalities."

What we see is as it gets harder to accomplish something you will either fail or achieve great success. A house painter could paint a house with their eye close and often do. They rarely face a challenge so their work is just done. On the other hand if you never painted a house everything is challenge so to actually finish could really only be a critical success. Call it beginners luck. Same goes for firing PA or using body armor or dancing a jig.

 

[Shonner]

A million-to-one chance does happen though in a cinematic-run Traveller game.

 

[Supplement Four]

The million to one thinking is fine, but it doesn't address the issue of a character having an easier chance at a harder difficulty level, and it doesn't address the fact that some players will figure out where it benefits their character to go Hasty on a task to have a better chance of success.

No matter how a person tries to handwave and accept a broken rule like this, the numbers do not lie, and it's just hard to swallow that chance of Spectacular Success on a 3D Difficult throw is less than half a percent (all three dice must roll six) where as the chance of SS on a 10D Beyond Impossible task is almost 20% (19.5%).

In other words: One in 200 Difficult throws will result in SS while one in 5 Beyond Impossible throws will result in SS.

 

[Vladika]

I know that some people have taken issue at the ways critical success is handled. How can you have a better chance at critical success as the difficulties get higher? Well I have thought about it and I ll have to agree with one of my favorite writers Terry Pratchett

"Traditionally, one has to say "it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!" to invoke this rule. It also has to be exactly a million to one - none of this fiddly "995,351 to 1" business, or whatever other number you might end up with. So while the list of things that people have accomplished with million to one chances is quite impressive, the list of things they have failed to accomplish with odds a few percentage points off in either direction is probably a lot longer and involves a lot more fatalities."

What we see is as it gets harder to accomplish something you will either fail or achieve great success. A house painter could paint a house with their eye close and often do. They rarely face a challenge so their work is just done. On the other hand if you never painted a house everything is challenge so to actually finish could really only be a critical success. Call it beginners luck. Same goes for firing PA or using body armor or dancing a jig.

SSDD

You have to just love Marc's sense of humor, "The harder it gets the easier it is".

T5 is a toolkit for CT through T5. It's also a paradox: T5 can't fix itself.

I have serious doubt about anyone actually reading the threads on CotI and then going out and buying it. (Some sure, as PT Barnum one said "________ ___________")

 

[Daddicus]

There's another thread on this somewhere. Something like "broken spectacular".

What I took out of that thread is that there needs to be a house rule that prevents the player from gaming the system. Personally I like the idea of having the extra die rolls chosen by the player do not count towards spectacular success, but they do count towards both kinds of failure.

 

[rancke]

What I took out of that thread is that there needs to be a house rule that prevents the player from gaming the system. Personally I like the idea of having the extra die rolls chosen by the player do not count towards spectacular success, but they do count towards both kinds of failure.

But that would require admitting that the RAW needed fixing, and apparently that kind of negativity is an absolute no-no.


Hans

 

[Vladika]

But that would require admitting that the RAW needed fixing, and apparently that kind of negativity is an absolute no-no.


Hans

"These aren't the RAW you are looking for".:devil:

 

[Daddicus]

I would prefer to leave things as-is, but this mechanic is clearly broken.

(The "make the task more difficult so you have a better chance to spectacularly succeed" part of the mechanic -- I like the rest of it.)

 

[Supplement Four]

Well, here's another expression of the same broken rule. Consider this...

Anytime a character has less than a 20% chance of success on a T5 task, he can improve his odds if he can figure a way to make the task Beyond Impossible.

So, if a character is Stat-7 and Skill-2, doing a 3D Difficult task, he'll roll 4D for 9 or less because of the TiH rule. That's a 10% chance of success.

The character can DOUBLE his odds if he figures a way to make the task 10D Beyond Impossible.

"But, Ref, what if I attempt the task with my hands behind my back and blindfolded?"





Problems with T5 aren't solitary, alone, unconnected to anything else. An rpg's mechanics are integrated and effect the game in ways that are not always noticed upon first glance.

This broken SS rule also effects the TiH rule. The TiH rule was created to maintain a balance between experience and natural ability (skill and stat). But, because the SS rule is broken, sometimes adding a die to a task makes the task easier to achieve when the TiH rule is designed to do the exact opposite.

In these instances, the broken part of the game affects and breaks a previously unbroken part of the game.

 

[GrayPennell]

What some are still missing is the counter intuitive nature of this. If you look at the charts in T5 you will see that while you do increase your chance at a spectacular success the odds of a regular failure increase much more dramatically. On pg 137 Marc talks about the situation as spectacularly stupid.

Taking the house painter again. Lets say they have a UPP 777777 with house painting 3. So their C+S is 10. On a normal, aka average job, they have a 92% chance at success or failure of 8% and no chance at spectacular success or failure. Now the painter wants to paint a 3 story house in half the time of an average job. The referee makes it Staggering roll. While it is true the extra three dices make a spectacular success or failure a bit more common the chance of success is now only 2% and failure is now 98%-- completely the reverse. The painter risk everything to get the job done, but if they do there is a good chance everyone will remember the job and talk about it passing the painter's card around giving them more jobs. Thats the definition of a critical success. Keep in mind too that the chance of spectacular failure increases at the same rate as the success. So the painter actually has a good chance of totally screwng up and destroy their reputation.

As a player it is better to succeeded on a regular bases than to risk a spectacular success. That is say, in a fire fight do you want someone taking the shoot that is a sure kill or something that might be real cool to see but probably wont happen? So players will work to keep the difficulty easy not make it harder. I could also try to work on gaining positive DMs as the difficulty gets harder so success becomes more common but that does not change the chance of spectacular success or failure.

 

[Licheking]

one option is if you have 3 odd coloured dice from the bulk of your set, then when you roll for task use these and you get Exceptional Success/Failure only if these 3 dice come up all 1 or 6's. The Traveller Dice set includes 1 Red, Yellow and White dice along with the 10 black dice so can be done with them.

Another option is only have Exceptional Success/failure if all the dice come up 1 or 6's this makes the chances of it happening harder and harder the more dice you roll.

Finally you can do what our group decided which was Exceptional Success/failure only occurs when you either fail or make the roll, so if you failed a task and got 3 6's then its an exceptional failure regardless of the fact that you might have 3 1's as well, they are ignored. And if you made the roll then if you had 3 1's then its an exceptional Success regardless of the 3 6's you might have which are again ignored.

 

[Original_Carl]

My solution is to grant spectacular success only if the roll is successful. Three ones and three sixes in the same roll becomes spectacularly interesting. Three sixes is spectacular failure.

 

[Supplement Four]

Two suggestions for fixing SS in T5 can be viewed via the T5 Fixes link in my sig.

 

[rancke]

I think that if I was to run a T5 campaign, I'd make sure people had two dice of one color, one die of another color, and a number of dice of a third color. The players would always roll the two dice of one color and the one of the other color. If it was a one-die roll, the one die is the one that counts; if it's a two-dice throw, the two dice are the two that counts. The other dice are ignored unless three ones or three sixes are rolled, in which case there's a spectacular result. For die rolls of three and more dice, spectacular results also comes when the three first dice have three one or three sixes.

This is pure theory. I haven't tested how it works. But at least it would remove the incentive to make a throw more difficult.


Hans