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General Tabletop Discussion
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Calibrating Difficulty Benchmarks to player expectations
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<blockquote data-quote="lichmaster" data-source="post: 9140032" data-attributes="member: 6683330"><p>That's an interesting but also somehow weird question.</p><p></p><p>From an "absolute" point of view, you could remark that the typical unskilled npc normally rolls 2 or 3d6 (attribute only), which means that they have 50% odds of success for difficulty benchmarks of 7 and 10 respectively. A skilled but still normal npc may roll 4d6 (attribute+1 rank skill), which means 50% success in task with difficulty 14.</p><p></p><p>So since he rolls 5d6 in hacking, he has 50% chances of success against DC 17, meaning he can do very easily stuff that normal people find challenging or maybe even almost impossible.</p><p>However, his skills with guns is much much better, giving him 50% chance of hitting a defense of 23-24.</p><p>So, from an absolute point of view his hacking skills are way worse than his guns skills.</p><p></p><p>However, the perception of difficulty of a task depends on his own skill. Regardless of how many dice he rolls, he may consider a task to be challenging if he only has 50% chances of succeeding, while a task may be considered easy if the chances of succeeding are say 85%, or very hard if they are below 15%. This are personal, psychological thresholds, and I'm not sure there's even a point in confronting a player regarding these.</p><p>What you cold do to make him more aware of his relative strenghts and weaknesses, is say "if you had as much training/talent as you had in guns, you'd succeed this task 90% of the times instead of 50%". This however is not always an obvious task, since you need to compute the actual chances of success for an arbitrary benchmark when rolling a certain amount of dice (seems a good idea for an online tool or a table to be added in WOIN resources, btw)</p><p></p><p>Finally, keep in mind that anyone may add LUCK dice to a roll. Since those dice explode, there's a vanishingly small but non zero chance for a normal untrained character to beat a DC 40+ task.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="lichmaster, post: 9140032, member: 6683330"] That's an interesting but also somehow weird question. From an "absolute" point of view, you could remark that the typical unskilled npc normally rolls 2 or 3d6 (attribute only), which means that they have 50% odds of success for difficulty benchmarks of 7 and 10 respectively. A skilled but still normal npc may roll 4d6 (attribute+1 rank skill), which means 50% success in task with difficulty 14. So since he rolls 5d6 in hacking, he has 50% chances of success against DC 17, meaning he can do very easily stuff that normal people find challenging or maybe even almost impossible. However, his skills with guns is much much better, giving him 50% chance of hitting a defense of 23-24. So, from an absolute point of view his hacking skills are way worse than his guns skills. However, the perception of difficulty of a task depends on his own skill. Regardless of how many dice he rolls, he may consider a task to be challenging if he only has 50% chances of succeeding, while a task may be considered easy if the chances of succeeding are say 85%, or very hard if they are below 15%. This are personal, psychological thresholds, and I'm not sure there's even a point in confronting a player regarding these. What you cold do to make him more aware of his relative strenghts and weaknesses, is say "if you had as much training/talent as you had in guns, you'd succeed this task 90% of the times instead of 50%". This however is not always an obvious task, since you need to compute the actual chances of success for an arbitrary benchmark when rolling a certain amount of dice (seems a good idea for an online tool or a table to be added in WOIN resources, btw) Finally, keep in mind that anyone may add LUCK dice to a roll. Since those dice explode, there's a vanishingly small but non zero chance for a normal untrained character to beat a DC 40+ task. [/QUOTE]
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