COMING SOON! -- The Awfully Cheerful Engine on Kickstarter! An action comedy RPG inspired by cheerful tabletop games of the 80s! With a foreword by Sandy 'Ghostbusters' Petersen, and VTT support!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 4297080" data-attributes="member: 5889">Hehe, most of what I've done is actually not that complicated. I haven't had a huge study of probability, so a lot of what I've done a more educated person probably could have done in half the time. Mainly what I've done is basic probability and combination theory. But I've been merciless at it, I've run hundreds of scenarios, tried and retried different equations again and again.Some people would write computer software to model the design, and I did that towards the end to verify my calculations and to more accurately represent certain sections that I was averaging to make the math easier. However, I find in general working directly with the math gives more a more intuitive understanding of what's going on. With a program, I can quickly see what changes do what...but the why I usually got by messing with the equations.Also, a good knowledge of excel works wonders.Here's an example of my thought process to help you understand better:For a while, the biggest problem with my system was that as the complexity increased, the win rate started to tank. That's a natural response to this kind of probability work, and its not something you can just reverse.So what I needed was a mechanic that gave a bigger bonus to a higher complexity challenge. Of course, the simplest way to do this is simply to say: "If your complexity is 3 or higher, subtract 1 from the DC or something". Things like that are actually the best way mathematically to fix the problem. Thing is, you never want the rules to get too complicated. In general, you want things as consistent as possible.So I started working on mechanics that affected all complexities, but that would affect higher complexities "more". I tried a whole lot of things, some worked but were too complicated to run, others simple but didn't help the math.Eventually I hit the idea of the bold recovery mechanic. Bold Recovery is a way for players to help themselves if they are doing badly. Which means the more the fail, the more they "win" as far as that mechanic comes in. So the higher the initial rate of failure, the more potent bold recovery becomes, and therefore, it tends to help higher complexities more than lower ones. Voila! That was a critical mechanic that allowed me to tighten up the differences between a 1st and a 3rd level complexity and provide a way for players to have a more active role in the system.</blockquote>

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