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Action Cost Theory

4 posts · 247 views · started 2019-07-15 18:54 UTC
ER
ErekLich
2019-07-15 18:54 UTC
#1

So I'm trying to come up with my own encounter-nuilding guidelines, and I was hoping the community could gutcheck my math.

Long story short, I made a giamt spreadsheet to calculate odds of successes vs minions, lieutenants, and overcomes for me, to see how many actions you should expect them to take up in the fight.  The idea is to then use those values as a reference for encounter design, so that you can tune how tricky you want an encounter to be.

Assumptions:  the 'average' die pool is d8, d8, d10, using the mid result against one target.  Obviously this will rarely be what actually happens, but I figured that ignoring all special abilites would round in the player's favor a bit anyway.  I further assume that a major twist "costs" one action, while a minor one "costs" half an action.

 

With those assumptions in mind, I got the following values:

Minions:

D4 1.3, D6 1.5, D8 1.8, D10 2.1, D12 2.5

Lieutenants:

D4 1.3, D6 2.9, D8 5, D10 7.7, D12 10.9

Overcomes end up costing an average of 1.6 actions.

So my question to those of you who have been able to play this more than I have:  Do these numbers sound right to you?  Are they close, or way off base?  Thanks!

AR
aramis
2019-07-15 20:11 UTC
#2

Having run two groups simultaneously on the same adventures... the variability swamps the numbers.

They don't seem off-base, per se, but don't seem terribly valid, either. 

ER
ErekLich
2019-07-15 21:24 UTC
#3

That seems very odd, since 3 dice take middle is much more consistent than just rolling one die...  but thanks for the feedback!

AR
aramis
2019-07-16 07:09 UTC
#4

It’s not the dice alone; it’s the action choices coupled with the random.

Also, many rolls are not keep middle.