Recent content by baudot

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thornhenge launches "Lyssan" on Kickstarter San Francisco, CA - JUNE 19th, 2011 - Thornhenge Games is pleased to announce the Kickstarter launch of its first boardgame, Lyssan. Lyssan is a medieval land wracked by never-ending civil war, a unified empire in name only...

Apple introduced easy ad hoc network gaming to the iPhone SDK not long ago. So you can set up games that let you search for other players on the same LAN and link up with them. At the very least, it would be easy to come up with a dice-roll requesting & sharing, as well as a note-passing app...

Just took the time to read it. Quite clever. The main improvement I'd think to make to it would be to expand the input to accept 5 distinct skill ratings and generate the probabilities for the 120 (5!) possible initiative orderings. (...and then I'd be tempted to accept party skill lists for...

Which approach did you have in mind, for a party with mixed skill levels? I'm certainly no fan of making work for myself. Markov is just the first place my sleep-deprived mind headed.

Detailed explanations of results are up. When I first started this, I figured I'd stop there, but seeing as people are asking for the ability to tweak the challenge system overall with manual DC and success/failure requirements/allowances, I'm thinking I'll throw that in next. Running...

It's a 50/50 if the party's chance of success per roll is 50/50. If the per-roll odds are better, then this gets stronger as the complexity rises. Conversely, if the party's odds are less than 50% per roll, then the odds get worse as the complexity rises. I like this so long as the base skills...

..and I look forward to reading your code in the morning, once I'm rested enough to make sense of it. ;)

That's deliberate. The notion I was aiming for was that more complex is not the same as more risky. Rather, more complex is a longer, more involved task, and if it has a cost, that cost will be higher. That is, if every fourth check forces you to pay to erase a failure, each complexity level...

Clearly I need to sleep more and think about skill challenges less. I just restated ideas from the DMG as if they were original. To be clear, the only original thing in that last post was the notion that if you can pay some in-game resource for forgiveness, it nicely meters the cost, since a...

To make forgiveness checks properly dramatic, their should be some kind of pressure on them. This can't be "if you fail the check it adds one to your failures" since that would make them a wash (at skill 9) and undo the whole point. Healing surges, where appropriate, remain good. If the party...

The math behind complexity+1: This is the same as the number of failures that causes the challenge to end in failure as a whole. This is just a sneaky way of saying that the new challenge chart is Level Win Lose 1 4 4 2 6 6 3 8 8 4 10...

I save to disbelieve! But seriously: Look at what happens to the math when you let the party undo (Complexity+1) failures and assume +9+levelMod as the standard skill level. You get a 50/50 success failure split. Plenty of room from there to juggle challenge design in how you give them them...

If the DM gives the opportunity for unlimited adds, then there's no reason not to push for the +8 on all skill checks for maximum assistance. At that point, things are too easy again. Hopefully we're designing challenges with a limit on how players can assist each other. As for the question of...

I'll be putting in an auto-explainer to lay the math bare later today or tomorrow.